MIDSTREAM 



Midstream 

A Chronicle at 
Halfway 



BY 

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 

*FATB 
KNOCKS AT THE DOOR,'' "ROUTLEDGE 
RIDES ALONE,'* ETC. 



NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



& 



*jp 






Copyright, 1914, 
By George H. Doran Company 



M -2 1914 



>CIA376133 



TO 
THE YELLOW LAMP 



FOREWORD 



In every man's heart there is a story. This 
is mine. I do not tell it as a writer, but as a 
man who has found his work. 

There is not a wail in this book. I am thirty- 
five years old — a well and work-glad man. 
Everything that is past was right for me, and 
everything to come is right. As for most of 
the evils which I make important with the good, 
I have no care now, other than to preserve the 
lessons of them, the sympathy and understanding 
for others which they alone teach. If I should 
forget these lessons, miseries were suffered in 
vain. Indeed the evil days would be challenged 
to come again. 

So, after this telling, all concern ends with the 
child so passionate for sensation, and with the 
youth and younger man in whom you will see so 
ripened a devil. If a man lives a grade higher 
life than he lived last year, he is a different man. 
He could not have risen unless the price were 
paid; be very sure of that. 

I show you a certain progress of life in the 
[7] 



FOREWORD 



child and boy and man known as Comfort. I 
know him best of all men. I would not call him 
another name in this, his story, — no artificial lit- 
erary form this time between you and me. 

Here is a test-tube, a crucible, for certain im- 
portant experiments. It shall break and the poi- 
sons compounded in it shall pass, but the final 
result shall pass only when proven a failure. I 
can understand an aversion on the part of many 
for this analysis of the solution of a man, for I 
have had that, too. In my youth I approached 
the candid and simple with shame and scom, but 
I have lived to approach them with gratefulness 
and delight. There is nothing wrong in the 
truth. 

We are meeting life every day. Much of life 
is designed to make us predatory; yet that is fail- 
ure. You will see why I say so. The joy of 
this book is to show how values came to me, in 
spite of evil beginnings, and that the way is no 
secret. 

A man's heart circle is very large, if he is nor- 
mal, and can tell his own true tale. I write as 
one might talk to friends in his study — not that 
I am good — far from that. But the light is 
clearer about me, the days brighter. There are 
descents and hollows in my life now, but the 
deepest hollows of to-day are a little higher above 
the level of the sea than those of yesterday. 
When I have finished with this story I shall lis- 

[8] 



FOREWORD 



ten again. I say it with gladness, there is not 
anywhere the old shadow nor vagueness of light. 
. . . Finally I write now at half-way, while I 
can remember, and before the glows and hallow- 
ings of age come to charm the far past into a 
fairyland. 

Will Levington Comfort. 



[9] 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

House 15 

Street 21 

Body 26 

A Man 32 

Another Man 37 

Gulf . 43 

Walt 47 

New House 57 

Intimations 66 

Strawberries 80 

Pistol 88 

Cincinnati 94 

Soldier 104 

Atlanta . . 114 

Manati 122 

Union Square 137 

Penelope 145 

Luzon 155 

Country 169 

Work 180 

Manchuria 188 

Art-Lamps 195 

Trinities 204 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Under-World 215 

Market Place . 225 

Fiction-Mind 233 

Insurrections 247 

White Bloom 260 

Summer . 268 

The World Man and His Mother . . . 278 



MIDSTREAM 



[13] 



1 
HOUSE 



IN a brick house, Lincoln Avenue, Detroit, 
I "came to." I was not born in that house 
nor city, but took up my record there. 
The house seemed old and large and austere 
to me then, and now — for it is still a productive 
property. 

The house was never empty; my grandmother 
was always at home. She sat facing the side 
door in the dining-room, a south window at her 
left. The front door of the house was seldom 
used. If a stranger rang that bell more than 
once, my grandmother would rise to go, but she 
was very lame. It took her so long to reach the 
door, that the stranger seldom remained. Those 
who knew us came to the side door, and when 
my grandmother saw them through the glass, she 
would call, "Come in." 

I passed the days in that dining-room with 
her. I remember especially the winters, though 
there were several years of this life. There were 
the side door, the cellar door, the hall door, the 

[15] 



MIDSTREAM 



bedroom door, and the kitchen door — all from 
this dining-room, and one south window facing 
a vacant lot. My mother was away teaching 
school all day; my grandfather was away preach- 
ing for weeks at a time; the idea of father did 
not penetrate the room, until long afterward I 
began to go abroad to the houses of $ie <|ther 
boys. I do not know what we did all day. . . . 
Some one across the street died, and afterward 
"their" rocking-horse was sent across for me. I 
have never seen so fine a rocking-horse since. 
There was something terrible about it being mine. 
I could not ride it for a long time, because my 
grandmother was nervous. 

She was intensely good to me, yet in that din- 
ing-room I drew the sense of my inferiority that 
was very real. The strong ingredient of my 
childhood seemed to be that of shame. I came to 
be ashamed of the house, of our food, of my 
grandmother's nerves. More than all, I was 
ashamed of myself, and very easily put out by 
others. I remember that the houses of other boys 
looked kingly. 

The father idea appeared. I must have made 
inquiries — but to no result. One day, the 
mother of a boy I was playing with asked me 
about my father. I was flushed and embarrassed. 
From something she said, I realised, alone after- 
ward, that she knew more about it than I did. 
The shame increased. 

[16] 



HOUSE 



There was, beside the rocking-horse, a book of 
animal pictures and a book of birds. These were 
very wonderful. I look at them now with burn- 
ing. It is just that. I would not like those 
days again. ... I would take a little pail and 
put a lunch in it, and ride away to hunt the ani- 
mals in the book. There was a picture of Liv- 
ingston struck down by a lion, which was wont 
to appear again after my mother took me up- 
stairs to bed. The book of pictures was taken 
away, but not for long. I never fell asleep at 
once. My mother would make several attempts 
to leave me, before I was really asleep. She had 
to go downstairs and "correct her papers." There 
was no fire in the upper rooms. 

Time came when the dining-room was not 
enough, but I knew the upstairs only as belong- 
ing to the nights. The hall, however, was long 
and dim, a great hunting and exploring ground, 
but my grandmother kept calling. Her sense of 
what a little boy might be up to, prevailed upon 
me very strongly. It may be that the first ideas 
of concealment, perversion and untruth, stimu- 
lated by my own tendencies, reached me psychi- 
cally from her suspicions. I do not say this as 
a truth; I love the old lady's memory. But I 
know that one of the world's everlasting mys- 
teries is the point of view of a child, and that 
his point of view is determined as much by in- 
fluences as by words. 

[17] 



MIDSTREAM 



In a niche in the wall, half up the stairway 
was a helmetted knight, made of some chalky 
composition and gilded. He was large as I, at 
the time, but had everything that goes with men. 
I was considerably afraid of him, sometimes re- 
garding him from a lower stair. Above the old- 
fashioned double-doors of the main entrance of 
the house was a pane of coloured glass; and in 
the afternoons the sunlight came through, tinted 
and very disturbing. I have seen the same tinge 
since in coming storms at sea. 

To the right of the hall were the front and 
back parlours. There was something pale and 
pent about the former as I remember, more for- 
eign than Asia was afterward. The back parlour 
had a huge case of books and an upright stove, 
only used when my grandfather was at home, and 
made a winter study of it. In the summertime 
he worked upstairs, writing, writing — his hand 
crippled from writing. 

This was John Levington, my mother's father. 
An Irish peasant boy, a British soldier, a Wes- 
leyan Methodist preacher in America — always 
writing, always fighting. A grand rugged man 
as I see him now, with something of the prophet 
about him. His son Will appeared occasionally 
at our house. This was the love of my heart, 
and the sorrow of his father's. Will's sister, my 
aunt, came once or twice a week and did much 

[18] 



HOUSE 



for me. These two were very great and hu- 
man. 

I went to school at five, but it seems before 
that I could read. I have heard others explain 
it in the same way. There was a time when I 
couldn't read, and another that I could. The 
steps are lost. The first time I ever felt the lift 
of a book was from Grimm, and the story was 
tfhe Foster Brother. A boy down the street, 
somewhat older, told me one or two of the sto- 
ries, and lent me the book. He had come over 
in the evening for a few minutes, and sat at the 
dining-room table, looking at my animal pictures. 
I was in a torture of shame at the bleak appear- 
ance of the room, and at my grandmother's words 
and nerves — in great relief when he was gone. 

It was hard for me to understand how he could 
loan me the book so readily. It seemed too 
much for him to do. 

He had asked me to read first The Foster 
Brother. His re-telling of some of the stories 
had not interested me greatly. Through him I 
saw their unreality. 

The next day, alone in the back parlour, sit- 
ting on a hassock, the thing ceased suddenly to 
be laborious print, and I was away with the tale. 
This was one of the greatest of life experiences; 
no doubt in my mind then that I was wicked, in 
such a love and joy. My grandmother was call- 

[19] 



MIDSTREAM 



** 



ing. It was like a warning bell from the coast 
— but I was carried out to sea. The fury of 
pleasure was so intense, that I was ready to fight 
for it. I was proud to acknowledge my slavery, 
vowed that I would circumvent any outside re- 
sistance to gratify the passion. 



[20] 



2 

STREET 



FIRST the house, then the street; each is 
wonderfully prepared for the child's re- 
ceptivity. ... I rode through the old 
avenue recently. It was with haste 
and gloom and strange tension. From almost 
every house I had seen the dead carried forth. 
It was not death, as I see it now — those long 
ago forms. It was the death that meant the ever- 
end of men walking up and down. The crepe 
white and black, the hush, the coffin brought 
down from the high steps; signs that often pre- 
ceded the white crepes — -blue of diphtheria, red 
of scarlet-fever — and the memories that grew 
dimmer and dimmer and farther apart. 

I had looked through the glass darkly. Many 
detached matters of incomprehensible conduct to 
the child and the boy were gathered now into 
the meaning of a single human weakness — this 
one weakness explaining all the sheaf of misery. 
I walked my horse, past ours and the house op- 

[21] 



MIDSTREAM 



posite. A little farther up was an old darkened 
side porch that I knew. A tragic-faced old 
woman was sweeping hopelessly now, as if con- 
demned to an eternal punishment of sweeping. 
I remembered a night of summer — I, a little 
child, called to that porch, by one who was known 
as "the prettiest girl in the city." She lay in a 
hammock and whispered to me and held me very 
close. I don't know what she said; I never did, 
but it was sweet and mysterious to me — that 
while of moonlit early evening, and my mother 
calling at last from our door. There was a purr- 
ing kitten in the hammock from time to time. 
She was married soon afterward, to a devil who 
kicked her face in, teeth and all. He was shot 
in a barroom brawl and died lingeringly. I used 
to like the scent of him, as he walked up the 
street in the early evenings, but he never spoke 
to me as other men did. . . . And just now, 
walking slowly up the street (it is like a fiction 
effect), I saw a tall thin creature, as old appar- 
ently as her mother who swept the steps, her 
features altered and shocking — the same who had 
pressed me close to her that long ago and happy 
night. 

The street, houses of playmates, houses of mys- 
tery, grocery, drug-store and the shop of the 
butcher; the different sunlight, and the rains that 
have never seemed quite the same since. I won- 
der if children are ever cold or hot? There is 

[22] 



STREET 



not the faintest memory of such a thing from 
those years. I remember going to the grocery 
with another boy to purchase brandy for mince 
pies. There was a dreadful fascination about the 
very word brandy; it was a name that caused 
our house to tremble like the mention of an an- 
cient curse. The bar was in the rear of the store, 
but the barrels of wine and liquors were stored 
in front with the grocery goods. The boy told 
the dealer what he wanted and gave over the 
small tin-pail which he had brought. We fol- 
lowed to the brandy-barrel, and as he drew it off 
in a tiny copper measure, I said, in the strange- 
ness of the spell which was upon me : 

"Let me smell it." 

The man looked up and obeyed. 

"You're Mrs. Comfort's boy, aren't you?" he 
said. 

"Yes." 

"Smelling it — won't be enough for you after 
a while," he remarked. 

Over and over again, with fear and shame, 
these words circled through my mind. The boy 
did not give any light. It was not a matter that 
I could explain, for to our house, the very er- 
rand would have seemed accursed. Long after- 
ward I realised that the storekeeper knew my his- 
tory. This incident became another item in the 
father idea. . . . One Saturday I was in and 
out of this boy's house several times, forenoon 

[23] 



MIDSTREAM 



and afternoon. His mother said to me laugh- 
ingly at last: 

"Why don't you bring your trunk?" 

I did not realise the crush of this, until I re- 
peated it to my mother; in fact, had I understood 
I would not have told. It was very bitter to her. 
I was not allowed to go there again for a long 
time. Another time I was waiting for another 
boy to go to school with him, and was asked into 
the dining-room. It was bright and large; the 
dishes were pretty. This boy's mother was one 
of my secret favourites. From a covered dish 
the father was helping the family to milk toast. 
I had doubtless done well enough for breakfast; 
certainly would not have thought of food except 
for the extremely attractive appearance of this 
milk-toast. It seems that I fell into a con- 
templation of the dish from a discreet distance, 
behind the boy's chair. His father saw me and 
asked if I had had my breakfast. 

"Yes," I said, "but we didn't have any of 
that—" 

The astonishing thing to recall, years after the 
shame passed, is that I got none. But he was 
a very petty and imperfect man, a horse-whipper, 
and that was a most unhappy house. 

I remember the interest with which our church 
was built; the pews bought; the new pastor 
chosen; how I watched the gold-leaf hammered 
on the great letters, Praise ye the Lord. I re- 

[24] 



STREET 



member the sermons, the attentive watching for 
the close, the study of the rising to the end, the 
breathless suspense lest this rising inflection of 
the preacher's should end only one certain dis- 
cussion, and not the sermon itself. Of course, 
it all looked to me right, the way it should be. 
But there was never a time in my self-conscious- 
ness when I felt pure enough really to belong. 
I must have been a perfect animal in the sense 
of smell. The church is all moving with odours 
in my memory; the smell of the opened hymn- 
books and the Sunday-school papers, the smell of 
carpets and varnished pews, the smell of furs in 
the days of snow and rain, of Easter lilies — the 
smell of the infant classes, and the different 
breaths of the people. I suppose things are bet- 
ter now, but then it all belonged to the church 
— and from it comes to me still something of 
death. 



[25] 



3 
BODY 

XWAS not a question-asker. ... A boy of 
one of the houses across was my earliest 
initiator into the how and what of our 
making. I was about seven and not 
large; he was no larger, but three years older. 
There was a nasty perversion upon all that came 
to me from and through him. His age was a 
fierce attraction to me, and he had the face of an 

innocent. . * •» 

His was a big brick house like mine, and much 
was in it-an attic of attractions, lower rooms sel- 
dom used, a Polish serving-maid of fifteen or 
sixteen, as interested as ourselves in sensation 
There were a few long summer afternoons in that 

house. „ . •! . 

The serving-maid, as I recall, was not evil, 
she was merely common, her nature adjusted to 
low animal vibration. The boy was evil pre- 
cociously so. I, too, was precociously eyd, but 
with a difference which I did not know then, but 

[26] 



BODY 



which life has proved to me — different in the pos- 
session of an automatic corrective tendency. 

If I should happen upon two small boys and 
an older girl in the midst of such engagements 
now, the first shock would contain the sense of 
their hopelessness. This comes of the readjust- 
ments of the years, in the process of which hazy 
curtains are hung, one after another, between us 
and the past. The more powerfully we mature, 
the more concentrated is our gaze ahead; and yet, 
we must reach in our progress that intensity of 
wisdom which penetrates the veils of the back- 
ground with the same power that discerns through 
the shine, the configuration of the upland. We 
must know ourselves, and cease lying to ourselves, 
in order to deal with children, in whom are ani- 
mals as well as angels. 

I knew the deadly poison of those afternoon 
hours in that old house. At the time I thought 
the other boy did, too, and must be fighting with 
himself, even though he made the abandonment 
possible. I never thought of the Polish girl in 
the moral way, for she was older, blindly ex- 
pectant, a destined bearer of bodies, no delicacy 
nor reservation of the finer human having come 
to her. ... I found myself often in a kind of 
enchantment, yet numbed by the calling forth. 
Once I ran down through the house to the street, 
and there finding it the same — all still, and sum- 
mery and sweet, just as I had left it, my house 

[27] 



MIDSTREAM 



still standing opposite, I was whirled about and 
hurried back. I must have thought that nature 
itself was undergoing some hideous convulsion 
to parallel mine. 

Once, when we three were in the attic, I heard 
a step below. I had not known how crippling 
terror could be until that moment. I could not 
at first move, but heard the step again. It was 
not on the floor below — farther downstairs. The 
unthinkable thing in my consciousness was to be 
caught as one of the three. I felt that discovery 
as one of the three would not only kill, but alter 
me in some horrible fashion. With the two whis- 
pering to me to come back, I began to let myself 
down the attic stairs. Whoever it was — I must 
fly past, and out to the street — if I could not 
escape without being seen altogether. 

The boy's mother was in the lower hall, when 
I reached the second floor. She was coming up- 
stairs. I ran into the first open door — her bed- 
room. Behind the door in a niche in the wall 
was a trunk, and above it, hanging from a rail 
of hooks, were many skirts and dresses. I 
climbed upon the trunk and concealed myself 
among the hangings. 

The boy's mother came in. She was singing. 
Something had pleased her. She thought she 
was alone in the house. She laughed and 
hummed and changed her dress. I had liked her 
from afar. I see now that she had drawn me, 

[28] 



BODY 

even as a child, because she was pretty and sen- 
suous. At this moment behind her door — I knew 
her only as the mother, the Nemesis. The 
ghastly thought was lest she should require some 
garment from behind the door. I made a cov- 
enant with God, that if I were allowed to es- 
cape, I should never go back to those two, never 
another summer afternoon. She finished her 
change and went downstairs still humming. I 
followed her forth from a distance — and kept the 
covenant. 

This other boy moved away at no great length 
of time later. Fully ten years afterward — I was 
seventeen — I heard that he was in the city. We 
arranged to meet, I welcoming the thought. It 
was a startling moment. I was always short, 
but he seemed the same as when I had left him 
— little, dry, old in body and brain, cheerful, 
sickly, obscene. 

I remember passion as a little child. Passion 
is the word. There were moments that I could 
not speak with it; yet I did not know what I 
wanted, and shame covered the presence of it. 
I remember the sense of fear that the skin would 
burst around my eyes. I wondered in certain 
moments how other boys could speak and laugh; 
it seemed to me that they must feel as I did. All 
these passions are identified inseparably in mem- 
ory with long summer afternoons; stolen hours 
in our attic where certain medical books were 

[29] 



MIDSTREAM 



stored; the terrific absorption, the trance of it, 
as it were; the coupling of certain plates with 
revelations from older boys; the working out of 
schemes of life from the two — and all with such 
a sense of shame, that I wonder it was not graven 
indelibly upon my face. Yet fascination held 
me to what were evil interpretations for a child's 
mind; for hours it must have been greater than 
the shame. However, from a certain book I 
learned what I had known instinctively (but 
there was value in this sanction of print), that 
unspeakable evils fell upon the head of one who 
gave way to these passions. I went again and 
again to the attic, fighting with myself every 
dusty step of that steep climb. 

Long summer afternoons — and I remember that 
other boys took my discoveries, and discoveries 
of their own, with an equanimity that I could 
never master. Indeed I could never give way to 
the studies in the books, without heavy reactions 
of suffering and humility; and always I would 
feel in giving way — the deepening of some evil 
brand upon my face. I prayed. 

This, in brief, is what I know about these 
things now : That the worst elements in my na- 
ture were not these passions, but that the best 
thing in my nature was a certain corrective im- 
pulse that gave them battle, and greater battle 
when I was alone. I know that a strong physical 
love which brings together a man and woman in 

[so] 



BODY 

a tumult of desire, even though it may preclude 
the greatest gifts of mind and spirit on the part 
of the child, does make for the physical beauty 
of the child. 

I know that routine is deadly; that losing the 
dream, even from physical desire is deadly; that 
strong physical love, reverting, after the novelty 
of possession is past, to a mere magnetism of sex- 
polarity, is a damnable failure on the part of 
human beings, and that the eyes of the poor lit- 
tle people who are incident to this low gratifica- 
tion, must look down. 

I know that there is a greater than physical 
love — a love between man and woman so elec- 
tric and potential, that the physical union is but 
the lowliest of its three caskets, and that immor- 
tals are eager to be born of this beautiful ex- 
pression. 



[31] 



4 

A MAN 



THE kitchen was always friendly and 
homelike ; alone so, of our house to me. 
In the summer there was a vegetable 
garden in the rear-yard. My mother 
was different to my eyes from any other being in 
the world. I can hardly remember seeing her, 
so deep and strange was my relation with her; 
and yet she wasn't exactly human, as I under- 
stood people to be; she seemed a being out of 
shadows and mystery, alone, perfect, yet apart 
from all others. I could not have told her 
things that I might have told others; and yet I 
was one with her in a way that made separation 
acute torture. My love for her had much agony 
in it — the fear that she would not come from 
school; the fear that I should wake up in the 
night and find her gone. I used to ask her every 
night at tea, "Are you going out to-night?" 

She seldom went out; she never failed me; yet 
with dusk coming on, and her not yet at home — 

[88] 



A MAN 



the anguish is dreadful to remember. I cannot 
bring words to portray that relation; and I won- 
der now if I can make others understand how I 
wanted a man in the house. My grandfather 
did not exactly supply the need. He was a saint, 
out of the world, his thoughts turned to God. 
The men who used to go by our house in the sum- 
mer eve, smelling of cigars, yet each -with their 
separate odour beside — so that had I been blind, 
I should have known the figure by scent — these 
filled me with passionate longing. 

My Uncle Will didn't come home regularly; 
often he came in after I was asleep, and was away 
too early for me in the morning; yet he was the 
one my heart turned to. He called me Dad, 
because, as he explained, I was a "sanctimonious 
cuss" and the twitch of my tow-hair at the collar 
behind was exactly like his father's, John Lev- 
ington. I battled every night to stay up, always 
a little longer, in the hope of his coming. His 
step on the porch, or "stoop" as my grandmother 
used to call it, was like the hail of rescuers. My 
mother's greeting was invariably restrained; my 
grandmother regarded him with pained suspicion ; 
I flung myself to his breast. We would go to- 
gether to the kitchen; he would sit back against 
the wall, smoking and holding me. He was a 
giant, of superb health, and there was money in 
his pockets in those days. The soft sweet flavour 
of alcohol so invariably about him, was different 

[33] 



MIDSTREAM 



from any other because his digestion was perfect. 
I would have missed it, had it not been* there. He 
used to try my strength roughly, groan under my 
weight, tell me of his younger days with "Boss" 
Custer, younger brother of the General (and 
killed with him by the Indians) — of horses, 
boats, swimming, ball-games — and they would 
be calling. Sometimes he would answer impa- 
tiently, "Let Dad alone, will you?" 

Once in the middle of the night, I awakened 
to hear my grandmother weeping downstairs. 
My mother and aunt were talking in terri- 
fied whispers. Will had been shot. I never 
knew exactly. . . . The bullet had entered his 
throat, grazing the big artery. It always hurt 
him afterward between the shoulder-blades. He 
had crossed a street from the house of the shoot- 
ing, and stepped into a bar (the red spring bub- 
bling from his throat, his linen soaked) and or- 
dered a drink. 

I was taken to him in the hospital where he 
lay propped. How strangely I remember his 
jovial "Hello, Dad"; the big yellow pears that 
were there; how he made me eat until I could go 
no further. After that, he had to leave the 
city. 

It must have been a long time before my im- 
portuning, and his, prevailed, but at last I was 
taken to him — a day's journey by train straight 
north. I had never been away from my 

[34] 



A MAN 

mother before; my grandfather was with me. 
Toward dusk, we came to the pine "slashings." 
Inspiringly dreary is the beginning of night in 
that sand and stump region, in that burned spec- 
tre land. The fear arises that the heaven-dimen- 
sion can not be operative in the midst of such an 
earthly desolation. Tears did not steal forth; 
they popped out, hot and plashy. They were 
not to be hidden, and my grandfather drew me 
close to him and said again and again: 

"We'll soon be there, Willie — and he'll be 
there." 

I wouldn't have gone back, but my soul took 
on forever something of that loneliness from the 
pine-barrens — the night making haste to cover 
them. We stepped down in the dark, and I 
heard his voice and felt his arms. He carried 
me around in front of the panting engine — 
across the track in the white glare from the head- 
light. . . . The crossing to death will be like 
that, I am sure, — dusk in the barrens, the full 
dark and confusion — the call, the arms, the 
mighty light, and the peace of it all. 

He had a little store at the edge of the tracks, 
to supply a lumber outfit at work in the woods 
behind, and the men of the saw-mill opposite — 
candy, tobacco and papers. Three transporting 
days I was there — the wood-stove for the cold 
nights, the lumbermen coming in and making 
much of me, life with men that I had wanted so 

,[35] 



MIDSTREAM 



deeply, my grandfather smiling and forgotten; 
yet happy to see that I loved his son so well. 

Some weeks after I had returned to Detroit, 
a letter came from Uncle Will stating that a 
friend of his, needing help, was to call at our 
house. I watched for days. Everything was 
forgotten in the watching, a pained anxious vig- 
ilance enough to make one ill. One afternoon 
I walked up the street behind a young man whom 
I thought must be this friend. With every step 
the conviction increased, the first sharp doubting 
overpowered in intense reality formed of hope. 
I gained on him, and was ready to thrust my 
hand in his, the instant he turned into our gate. 

The stranger passed on, our house like another 
to him. I choked and went to the cellar to get 
myself in hand. It seemed one of the things that 
could never be told. In fact, it was never told 
until now. I remember the intensity and the 
shame of it, with a feeling of dismay, because 
other children must have these tragedies and can- 
not speak. . . . This was the need of a man — the 
aching unfulfilment of those years. 

Uncle Will lived to make the same furious 
alliances with my own little children, I laughing 
and disregarded as my grandfather had been. I 
had the pleasure of much of him afterward. He 
would send for me in the deeps of his later drink- 
ing. He never married and died hard. As a 
child I think I would have died for him. 

[36] 



5 
ANOTHER MAN 



AFTER that first trip, my grandfather 
loved to take me forth on his preaching 
journeys. He was used in his latter 
years by the Methodist conference in 
Michigan as a sort of arouser of decadent charges. 
There was too much fight in him for peace and 
plenty ever to come. He was fighting against 
slavery when even the North was neutral. His 
life was attempted, his sanity questioned, and 
"charge" after "charge" taken from him, until 
he had come to this. 

There was no harangue in him, though he 
preached a personal God — a God who answers 
prayer, a God to commune with personally. He 
preached the mastery of self, the life of service 
and kindness, the life of production and loving- 
kindness to others- — I can still hear him cry, 
"How excellent is Thy lovingkindness," — and 
every detail of his preaching he lived to the 
letter. 

There was a sweet lyric strain in the man. I 
remember his reciting a certain metrical version 
of the Twenty-third Psalm, learned at his 

[37] 



MIDSTREAM 



mother's knee in Ireland. Listening, as a little 
boy, some startling softening spirit flooded 
through me, and all about him were men and 
the slave-women of the farms — resolved into 
tears. He would preach upon Saint Paul — 
preach long hours it seemed to me, yet no one 
left, though many came softly in. I remember 
the summer mornings, the horses snuffling and 
clearing their nostrils outside the window, the si- 
lences of Sunday abroad in great golden light, 
the weeping of the women. 

Then he would go alone out into the woods at 
nightfall to pray. He ate no meat, an egg some- 
times, but milk and honey and graham bread. 
He was nearly eighty years old, but the training 
of sixty years before, in the British army, still 
kept his shoulders back, his waist like a young 
woman's and his chest rounded. I can hear him 
say "Willie," as no one else ever said it. . . . 
I remember discovering how easy it was to lie to 
him; and of the shame of lying to such a simple 
heart, so that it became hard for me. I was do- 
ing things then which I could not let him know; 
experimenting with chewing-tobacco, for instance. 
He saw a paper of fine-cut in my pocket, and I 
told him that I bought it so I would have some 
for the hired men when they asked. This was 
only partly true, for I loved the smell of to- 
bacco, and the taste of a fibre for a moment. 

He did not ascend those country pulpits to 

[38] 



ANOTHER MAN 



arraign the sins of the people. I have found 
since that he was a fighter only in the midst of 
complications, not in the centres of simplicity. 
From his gentle beginnings, the "spirit" would 
come to the congregation; and the leaders, among 
those gathered, would take the meetings out of 
his hand, and go through the old galvanism of 
calling sinners to the altar, of confession, experi- 
ence, — emotions and voices rising — until scenes 
of excitement were enacted. He would sit with 
bowed head. I am far from sure that he loved 
these boisterous fulfilments. 

One week-night after church-service, I walked 
back to the farm-house with him along the coun- 
try road. It was our last talk together of the 
real side of the world, which is not so far be- 
yond a child as we are prone to conclude. The 
stars were out, white mists lay upon the fields, 
and only the woods were dark. I was somehow 
in the very glow of things. . . . Just a few 
nights ago in this study, a friend expressed it 
perfectly: "It was one of those white nights, 
when everything is clear to the mind/ 5 . . . My 
grandfather told me how he used to leap from 
the Irish cliffs into the sea; how he had gathered 
his belongings in a handkerchief and departed, 
his stick upon his shoulder, his mother weeping; 
how poor they were, and how near was God. . . . 
He had learned "the Greek" alone. He was 
mighty in the Scriptures, and prayed unceasingly. 

[39] 



MIDSTREAM 



I know of no man in all the world worthier to 
be in the middle distance of one's lineage; yet 
he grew up on the clay floor of an Irish cabin, 
and behind him, was unlettered peasantry. . . . 
As we neared the farm-house, all too soon that 
night, he looked up at the stars and said: 

"Willie, thafs home. Those are the lights of 
our City. We see them as if from the sea — com- 
ing Home." 

The following Sunday morning early, I found 
him praying in the room we occupied. I turned 
away from the look of his eyes. They were half- 
open, and he was lost in the concentration of 
prayer. I wondered if it were not madness to 
look that way. It wasn't madness, but sanity. 
It was the look of a pilgrim in a strange country, 
but not afraid. 

I walked on ahead toward the church, a mile 
away; my grandfather was to drive with the old 
mother of the farm-house. Ten minutes after- 
ward the rig passed me on the road. I didn't 
understand. He was always a perfect horseman. 
The beast was in a high slow lope, but I was too 
young to know from the reddened eyes, and the 
bit-chewing, that he meant business. ... I saw 
the old woman's mouth. It was open, round, as 
if an egg was to be produced from it. One rein, 
my grandfather held close to his breast: the other 
was well in hand. His face was set. He was 
speaking to the horse, a long-bodied bay, with a 

[40] 



ANOTHER MAX 

head like a reptile, notoriously wicked over the 
country-side. 

The strangeness of it all was that I was not 
excited. There was a hush upon everything, that 
saintly enchantment of Sunday, the high vivid- 
ness of an August nine-o'clock. Three farm- 
boys ahead were excited. They knew; and yet, 
they had stood aside as I did, to let the runaway 
pass. They yelled to me what would hap- 
pen. . . . We saw the carriage suddenly blown 
forward. The mankiller had straightened out. 

The rest of the mile to the church was a mat- 
ter of seconds ; the buggy was whipped along like 
an umbrella in a cyclone. There was an explo- 
sion of dust at the church when the bay turned 
in. I had an instant profile of the beast stretched 
out in the run, the buggy careening. The boys 
called from ahead that the rig had turned 
over. 

They w r ere just lifting the old woman when I 
reached there. She was covered w r ith dirt and 
blood; and the sounds that came from her were 
like a hideous snoring. She lived. My grand- 
father was upon his feet, asking for help to re- 
move his coat. I remember how slim he looked 
after the black frock coat was removed, and how 
white his linen in the sun. 

He had been thrown upon the field-stones of 
the steps of the church, where he was to preach 
that perfect morning — his body broken from col- 

[41] 



MIDSTREAM 



lar-bone to hip on the one side; yet he had stood 
while they helped him remove his coat from the 
ruin; and walked with assistance to the parson- 
age. The second night afterward he died. 



[42] 



6 
GULF 



IN the sixth or seventh summer, my mother 
took me to Philadelphia, where we stayed 
for several weeks with relatives of my 
grandmother. The journey seemed very 
long and perilous, on account of the travel- 
terrors of my mother, whom I reflected like 
a deep pool. We stopped for a day in New 
York. There was anguish in the first ride on the 
elevated rails, and the excursion to Central 
Park was altogether dismal. In the crowd 
at the Philadelphia station, the man finally ap- 
peared, and there was peace, and a carriage. He 
was superintendent of the civic institution known 
then, and possibly now, as "The House of 
Refuge," a sort of detention for incorrigible boys 
and girls. His house within the stone-walls, was 
ancient and grim ; the life there stately. The man 
gave me handfuls of small coins from time to 
time, a very great deal of money, that made me 
want things; yet he was very good. The journey, 
carriage-rides every day, the environment and all 

[43] 



MIDSTREAM 



the pictures of it, seem a little out of relation to 
the rest of my life. 

The next summer vacation brought an event. 
I was considered too young to be prepared for 
it; knew only that we were going North, and 
were to spend some weeks on the shores of Lake 
Michigan. Toward evening, after travelling 
since early morning, we reached Petoskey. My 
mother led me by the hand out of the coach ; and 
no sooner did she touch the platform than a man 
took her in his arms. Astonished and rebellious, 
I was informed of my father's presence. This 
visible turning of my mother to some one apart 
from myself was a shock. 

I remember the splendid supper at the big 
hotel, and how they talked. Next morning, we 
took boat for our real destination. My father 
was slow to speak, a kind man, with a rich and 
eager mind. He took absolutely no part in my 
management or order. My mother was essence 
of life to me, the mighty need. I believe she 
was happy that summer. ... I remember Lake 
Michigan, the harbour, fishing interests, the com- 
ing of the big sailing craft, cool piney air, the 
bluffs and the storms. Of all these I was a sort 
of healthy solution, with no great emotions nor 
sensations. 

That fall, after school was resumed, I was told 
that my father was coming to live with us. It 
is almost laughable, my first thought, yet there 

[ 44 ] 



GULF 

is something grim about it, — how I should ex- 
plain this to the boys of the street. 

He came, a dear unobtrusive man and went 
about his work. From toleration, my grand- 
mother came to sanction him stirringly. There 
was an oppressive self -consciousness to my com- 
ings and goings for a while, but this wore away. 

About this time in the attic, (the fascination 
of the old books and papers there, had only sub- 
sided in so far as I was coming to the end of dis- 
coveries,) I found a scrap-book which contained 
a set of newspaper clippings regarding the suicide 
of a certain Thomas Comfort. Four local pa- 
pers told the same story in different words. He 
had been in the drug business with his brother, 
Silas H. Comfort (my father) and on New 
Year's morning in 1877, leaving the family be- 
low% he went to his room and drank prussic acid. 
His mother entered shortly afterward, thought 
him asleep, and drew the covering over him. . . . 
I pondered the matter until I could see Uncle 
Will, who by this time had returned from the 
North, but was not often at the old Lincoln 
house. 

"It was the drink, Dad," he explained. 
"Your uncle Tom was a fine fellow — a brilliant, 
droll chap. He broke over that New Year's 
eve— after keeping straight three months. 
There was a dear girl waiting for him — but he 
wouldn't go to her, after falling into the old 

[45] 



. 



MIDSTREAM 



ways. . . . Yes, I knew Tom well — we were 
often together, and great times we had. A rare 
boy, was Tom. . . . Your father was older. 
He closed out the drug-store after that." 



[46] 



7 
WALT 



LINCOLN AVENUE was not without 
beauty, with its large separate brick 
houses and fine rows of maple trees. It 
was backed to the east by a half-alley, 
on the far side of which was a row of cottages, 
very low and poverty-stricken, I had a keen 
sense of this poverty across from our garden. 
To the west of Lincoln Avenue, were many open 
fields; to the southwest, another locality of in- 
ferior appearance, but which had given to the 
world a race of boys of exceptional vitality and 
deviltry. These passed through Lincoln daily on 
the way to school, and implanted what they had. 
The boys of the poorer locality to the east, added 
a commoner but quite as permeating viciousness. 
So we grew up in touch with all the roughness 
and toughness of the lower quarter, and added 
a more finished crookedness of our own. 

I cannot remember my first lie, nor my first 
theft. Against the latter I have a distinct sense 
of putting up a fight, but cannot recall the in- 

[47] 



MIDSTREAM 



cident. I had a native vim for evil in many 
ways, but believe I was not a natural thief. 
Lincoln Avenue sieved all that was interestingly 
bad, as I have said; and there was not much of 
clean-cut and bonafide boyhood. The names of 
the boys come back to me with the last word in 
so many cases — Dead, Dead, Suicide, Prison, In- 
sane, Dead, — with here and there a travelling 
man. Everything that seemed sport had a 
roughness and cruelty about it striking to re- 
call. 

Walt, my particular friend at this time, a boy 
of my age and of a very well-to-do home, was 
away with his people for the summer, when a 
crowd of Lincoln boys broke into his carriage- 
house and partially demolished with croquet mal- 
lets a fine double-surrey. I was out of this. An 
investigation followed, and one of the results, was 
that two brothers farther down the street were 
kept in their yard for the remaining eight weeks 
of the summer vacation. We thought it bitter 
hard for them; ceased to respect the parents en- 
tirely. Occasionally we talked with the boys — 
the fence between. It was a severe bit of father- 
ing; but the fact remains that these two were 
somehow saved from Lincoln Avenue wreckage. 

Walt had his own idea of the affair when he 
returned. He had a keen sense also of property. 
His mind supplied a curious understanding for 
the vandalism — that was right enough — but the 

[48] 



WALT 

fact that it was his carriage-house, (not his 
father's) was cause for certain irritation. 

Walt was full of values. We were of a size 
and age, he slightly taller or heavier one season, 
I the next. I felt my inferiority always, and so 
did he. I was lieutenant, never captain. He 
had everything. The first telephone I ever saw 
was put into his house. One week, he pos- 
sessed a printing-press or a box of tools; another 
an alcohol steamboat that did perfect ovals in 
the bath-tub. 

Sunday afternoons Walt was dragged away 
with dark regularity and dressed up. Later I 
often found him with a pocket full of silver and 
pennies. Mondays, after school, the purchase or 
trade of the week would be negotiated. There 
was never any doubt in Walt's mind regarding 
the issue of these periods. Often, just as I was 
beginning to enjoy and appreciate a certain ar- 
ticle, his interest in it subsided. No boy was 
ever more swift to drain the pith of reality and 
make it his own. At the same time, his estimate 
of the current value of the article remained 
strongly in mind as a medium of trade. He be- 
came known for squares around as a trader, and 
enjoyed the reputation. The value of a new pos- 
session was heightened in his fancy, if he had the 
best of the bargain. 

I possessed so little, that I did not enter into 
his scope as a trader, but was always his second 

[49] 



MIDSTREAM 



in the arrangements, and largely but not entirely, 
his confidant. I never shared with any equality 
these matters which came so easily. I fed his 
presses, held the boards for him to saw ; and in my 
sharp interest for the operations did many menial 
services. This rapid passage from one to another 
world-interest went on for many weeks. Scan- 
dal was upon us, and neighbourhood indignation, 
before I knew that he had profited by a peculiar 
intimacy with the collection-boxes, and finally 
had been caught at it. The stealing was not the 
point; we were light-fingered then; but stealing 
from the church had an abandonment about it. 
What Walt suffered for that, I never learned, 
nor what passed between him and his father and 
mother. He could hold his tongue. I do know 
that his point of view did not change; and I do 
know that he was not imprisoned for anything 
like eight weeks. Though his income stopped, 
his inclination for large operations was in no way 
diminished. 

One summer afternoon, we went on a journey 
to a far tough part of town. I was carrying a 
grain-bag, as usual not knowing what was on. 
He walked hastily, his head down. Always his 
lines were laid beforehand — thief and thorough- 
bred that he was, and no gossip about it. We en- 
tered an alley, forced a difficult entrance through 
an unglazed window that was boarded with 
strips, straw packed in. Once inside, in the cool 

[50] 



WALT 



dark, I heard the doves above and felt the bag 
in my hand. I remembered, too, that Walt had 
spoken some days before about a pair of famous 
carriers that he wanted. I knew little about 
pigeons, even though he always had a cote full 
of "commons." He had cats, a dog or two al- 
ways, a fox or a wild bird from time to time. 

The hour was right — late afternoon and the 
pigeons had come in. I was to follow him up 
and hold the bag while he entered the nest and 
chose his game. I remember asking how he'd 
keep the pigeons after he got them home, think- 
ing that they would fly back to their own cote. 
He answered, in whispered impatience as we 
climbed, that he would shut them up for a week. 
Of course, thought I, dwelling mentally upon my 
stupidity. He was in the nest. There was a 
great flapping from the frightened birds, when 
I heard our summons from below. 

I was first down. I do not know how I got 
down. It never occurred to me to seek to escape. 
The bag was still in hand. The man of the 
house was there, a policeman with him. I 
thought of my mother, choked, but did not cry. 
They spoke of the patrol-wagon already sum- 
moned. Apparently they knew there was a pair 
of us, for they called to Walt to come down. 
Still he didn't answer. There was no sound 
from above. They threatened to go up and get 
him. I thought he must have escaped over roofs. 

[51] 



MIDSTREAM 



They looked at me, but did not ask. The fact 
is, they knew. The policeman started up, and 
Walt stirred. I heard him say hoarsely, "I'm 
coming." 

Now tolled off some hard minutes. They 
didn't ask questions, didn't threaten. It was 
business-like waiting for the patrol. Walt went 
to the hydrant several times and took a deep 
drink. He seemed to drink a gallon each time. 
The men commented upon it. They looked at 
their watches impatiently. "It's a longish drive 
from here," said the policeman. . . . Several 
times we heard wheels. Finally the man said 
he'd let us go, but the policeman refused to yield. 
I remember that policeman's face. At last the 
man persuaded him to release us, if we would 
bring our fathers. We were off. Walt accused 
me of telling them that he was in the loft, but 
appeared to believe when I swore I hadn't. I 
asked him what he thought his father would do 
about it; my idea being to trust to Uncle Will. 

"I won't tell him," said Walt. 

I gasped at this. 

"That was all a bluff," he concluded. 

He was right, although I couldn't see it then, 
and was in a state of suffering and turmoil until 
I saw my uncle two days afterward. He re- 
garded it rather seriously for him. ... I never 
saw that man of the pigeons again. The older 
I grew, the more I respected him. . . . 

[52] 



WALT 



Walt and I were always together Friday 
nights, mostly at his house. Nothing was secret; 
nothing sacred to us. We profaned ourselves in 
many ways, but with Walt such matters were not 
so all-absorbing, as to the other boy across the 
street; in fact, they were mere incidents of his 
busy restless mind. They had their place, but 
did not overpower. 

We did much secret reading; Walt was vora- 
cious. Openly we read Alger, Adams, Fenn, 
Fosdick, Henty, Marriot. Early one Friday 
evening, my mother came over. We had not 
yet gone upstairs, but were on the floor in the 
sitting-room as it happened, looking at the big 
book of Dore bible pictures. The mothers whis- 
pered in their pleased way, doubtless of our beau- 
tiful relation. 

The strangest veils of illusion are hung between 
the parent and child. A father is needed for 
boys; a father who takes time to remember, and 
who has strong enough vision to look back, in 
order to reach a present adjustment to the boy- 
mind. The instant the man and boy go differ- 
ent ways, lies and secretiveness result. There is 
no more important business for a man than to 
look back from time to time — to find the 
boy's point of view. He cannot assume yours. 
You are apt to lose him, if you do not. 

We had what Walt called cougees — secret hid- 
ing-places, reached deviously as a wolverine's 

[53] 



MIDSTREAM 



lair. Under the floor of a certain shed in his 
yard, we had burrowed a nest; and later when 
pigeons palled, the cote in his loft was partly 
walled up, so as to form a blind, behind which 
we had a small room, reached by a passage 
through the ceiling of the harness-room — a pas- 
sage that would have endangered human life in 
any stage, except inspired boyhood. An egg 
burned over an oil-stove here, tasted better than 
broiled chicken at home. In this hole we ex- 
hausted the oxygen, practised smoking and read 
the worst novels procurable. 

There was a certain series of Saturday morn- 
ings in which for me the slaughter-house was a 
mastering attraction. My thoughts were un- 
speakable at first — the tail-twisting, the rope, the 
ring, the ax, the knife, the blood-scared cattle, 
and the white of their eyes as their heads were 
drawn down to the floor — the stroke with a sound 
like nothing else — all the horrible enactments 
that followed, and the inner discoveries. 

I remember wondering about the butchers. 
They were men among men, not greatly differ- 
ent from other men, outside the abattoir. I saw 
that other men respected them. I could not pre- 
sume to tell them that the thing they did every 
day, called me by its hideous perversion. The 
same thoughts came to me afterward when I was 
little more than a boy, afield with troops. Per- 
haps I was following the same perversion; at 

[54] 



WALT 

least many of the things I saw, outraged every 
human fineness. Still in those early days I could 
not rise against the butchers, nor against my 
country at war. 

About this blood-passion, I prayed. In the 
nights, the scenes recurring, made me wretched, 
but when Saturday came again, I dared to fare 
forth. I felt all the more desolate in this pro- 
pensity, since Walt was not called to follow it. 

We must have been about twenty-five, when 
Walt and I met after many years. We talked 
through a Turkish bath. The old days were 
discussed. The world had scarred us both. Our 
experiences had been similar in drink and fail- 
ure, reaction and disease. I had not yet touched 
bottom then; but I was not rising. A few early 
"successes"— what a metallic sound that word 
has — had come to me in syndicate correspond- 
ence from afield. Walt liked parts of my work, 
and disliked other parts. There was one maga- 
zine story that he liked particularly. He com- 
mented upon that with enthusiasm; and when we 
spoke of the future, (we were lying cot-to-cot in 
the cooling-room,) he said: 

"If you're going to drink, why don't you learn 
how to drink? I've heard you have days, when 
you seem to be afraid somebody else will get 
some. . . . I've always told people that you 
would make mighty good in your game, if 
whiskey didn't beat you to it." 

[55] 



MIDSTREAM 



As I see it now, (and think of him who lay 
there beside Walt,) that was a very wise remark 
of his, even though he gave me the benefit of a 
balance, that was against me at the time. 



[56] 



8 
NEW HOUSE 



A YOUTH is swept by every passing 
wind; he is part of all that he sees 
and does. Of necessity shallow, be- 
ing so largely physical, he imitates, 
lives in the body, trains the brain. The emo- 
tions and passions of childhood are more sig- 
nificant, for they express the intrinsic gift of hu- 
man spirit. The youth, beginning to depend 
upon and to express the world, loses the beauty of 
helplessness which is a forever-challenge to the 
adult. The youth manifests his environment; the 
child expresses himself. 

A spring afternoon of mixed rain and snow, 
and my mother came home in the early darkness 
with the word that she had bought "the house." 
I had heard of this distantly, with a sort of half- 
listening. She sat down in the lamp-light, with- 
out removing her furs, to tell my grandmother 
and me.' Later in the spring, my aunt and her 
family came to live in the old house which my 
grandmother would not leave ; and we moved f ar- 

[57] 



MIDSTREAM 



ther up the Avenue. A home of her own had 
been for years, one of the heart-ideals of my 
mother. The first sizeable payment had been 
made with her school money. She continued to 
teach; and my father's income, while not large, 
was added; so that we were nicely on the road to 
competence and commonality. A brother — my 
father's boy by a previous marriage — came to 
live with us at this time. I have often wondered 
what the difference would have meant to me, if 
things had gone on as begun now, according to 
my mother's dream — savings, house and prop- 
erty paid for, the education of two boys. But 
neither she nor I were ever intended for any such 
calm. 

My first inkling of the primal tragedy began 
at the supper-table before we were fairly settled. 
Serving us, my father would make certain cutting 
remarks, each night more reckless and unreason- 
ing. My mother's replies did not prevail against 
him. Her misery was mixed with rage, too. He 
was lost in his own formation of sentences, quite 
absorbed in the goading deviltry of them. The 
room seemed filled with hell. . . . He had 
fought hard and manfully for two years, but was 
falling day by day into the old pit. . . . How 
many times afterward have I sickened at these 
beginnings — the impish cleverness, the absence of 
responsibility, characteristic cuttings of all con- 
cerned; and from a man who better almost than 

[58] 



NEW HOUSE 



I 



any other, could keep his own counsel and tem- 
per. I learned to tally off his periods almost ex- 
actly. There would be a time of peace, from 
two months to ten weeks at first; then a week or 
ten days in which he reached home for supper a 
little later each night, his faculties less and less 
in hand. Then the smash; after this, the rem- 
nant gathered in, terrible illness, the vow, re- 
sumption of what was left, and the gradual in- 
crease of tension on our parts toward the fresh 
outbreak. . . . He had been a soldier in the 
civil war, one of the youngest cavalrymen Michi- 
gan furnished. A partial loss of hearing re- 
sulted from exposure— and his pension quarterly 
became to us a harrowing interval. My mother 
broke under strain — -was finally brought home 
from school, and lay for months dangerously ill, 
I stopped school in this interval, and did house- 
work. It was easy enough for me, but the 
routine galled. 

I had learned nevertheless how remarkably 
well-bred and deep-minded my father was. 
Like my Grandfather Levington, his father had 
been a Methodist preacher in Michigan. This 
was William Comfort, who died early. I never 
saw him, but the impression has come that he was 
a strong-minded disciplinarian, escaping from 
whose rigid barriers, his sons were loose, indeed. 
My father's mother was a Hopkins, straight from 
the Mayflower family, a brilliant and excep- 

[59] 



MIDSTREAM 



tional woman, her paternal line being the Aliens 
which contained the Ethan of Ticonderoga; in- 
deed she possessed for a time the famous sword, 
which the Revolutionist brandished, while utter- 
ing his historically-modified oath. So conscious 
of the shortcomings of his personal identity, was 
my father, that I had to learn for myself that his 
people on both sides had done many fine things 
in this country. I think he was as apart from 
these familiar amenities in thought, as I have 
been; even if he could not, in looking back, ad- 
just himself to the Irish peasantry where my 
thoughts of lineage like to dwell. I did him deep 
injustice always; I exhausted shame for him, but 
I could love him now. 

It was no sweet cool morning glow, this child- 
hood and boyhood, but a red feverish breaking 
into day, filled with fierce distractions like the 
morning of the Fourth. I venture to repeat that 
there were things which I wanted with nothing 
short of fury, although parents are slow to con- 
sider the intensity of young desire. I loved 
horses, and my only vent for this love was to be 
near horses belonging to others. I had for a 
companion in upper Lincoln a rather stolid boy, 
whose father sold wood and coal and other prod- 
uce. I remember their kitchen; the smell of 
creamery and barn about it. I used to go there 
for milk every day, but could never remain in- 
doors. The odour of the barn would not have 

[60] 



NEW HOUSE 



troubled me alone, for I like that. It was the 
creamery mixture. There was a piebald pony 
that they occasionally permitted me to ride — a 
stupid sort of pony, too, with a flat broad back. 
I learned to stand up, circus-fashion, and loved 
the beast with a sort of martyrdom. I lived lit- 
erally from ride to ride. 

One Saturday afternoon when the family was 
leaving entire, I was in and out of the barn while 
the team was being harnessed. The intensity of 
my desire for a ride must have penetrated some 
brain about me, with the result that I was or- 
dered to keep out of the barn while they were 
gone. This was unusual. They had always 
given me a keen sense of their property-hood. 
When they drove out of the yard, it fell like a 
blight— the temptation. I was carried with it, 
as I watched the old surrey disappear, — entered 
the barn, saddled and rode out. But there was 
no joy in it, for I was afraid, not of a blow, but 
a look. . . . Another endless summer after- 
noon. 

Things that I desired with intensity, and all 
matters which incited my deeper interest, set me 
to writing, as surely as shutters vibrate to cer- 
tain winds. I was not only reading old Sleuths 
and Deadwood Dicks at this time, but writing 
them. "Bareback Bill, the Boy Rider," was con- 
siderable of a manuscript, before the complica- 
tions of his life balked my handling entirely. 

[61] 



MIDSTREAM 



Poor little Bill, who rode so well that it never 
became a day's work with him. He rode range, 
and every minute in the saddle was such a de- 
light, that wages for riding was the last word 
in absurdity — except that his mother at home 
needed money. I remember she had a pansy-bed 
in the back yard. Bill used to think of it with 
a gulp of homesickness, when he tethered his pony 
for the night, and dropped down to sleep by the 
wolf -scaring fire. 

I played much base-ball, yet it was mainly on 
stolen time — the house and my mother needing 
me. Walt was a natural ball player, but my 
hands were never right. I had passed the age 
of twelve, before making any remarkable prog- 
ress. In spite of the lightness and small bones of 
my fingers, the position of catcher had the strong 
clear call. I concentrated for several seasons on 
''picking them off the bat" with almost the zeal 
that had to do with books and writing, my peren- 
nial infatuation. I won a good name in amateur 
circles as a catcher, but had a weakness that was 
never to be overcome, in throwing to the bases, 
especially to first and third. There was a period 
in which I threw to second with good results. 
In all departments of this and other games I made 
up for size and strength in speed; and had two 
seasons of open tackling in football that quite 
noised the name. I was never beaten in a foot- 
race by a boy of my age. 

[62] 



NEW HOUSE 

One ball game especially, I remember, for the 
rousing sensation it brought me. The two teams 
had fought it out in a quiet dogged way — a low 
close score, and some very good playing. There 
was a stunted chap named Mark pitching to me; 
his drop ball, easy to catch, was working admir- 
ably. I seemed in a trance; there were a few 
hard foul flies which I got under; the opposition 
went out one-two-three, our outfielders idle; the 
third strikes and foul-tips staid in my mit. For 
me the illusion of time was suspended almost as 
in sleep. Innings ran on; I catching in a daze 
of delight. Our batting periods netted nothing. 

I think of it now in reference to good work of 
a higher kind — when the body and brain are 
obedient and in order. It was my first sense of 
the subjective in action. It all worked out per- 
fectly for me that day; I was at peace in a superb 
sense of the word. A ninth inning, our last bat, 
two runs to win, and two men on. I was never 
a long hitter, though I could usually get a base 
with my speed, on a bunt. Luck gave me the 
needed single over short field, and I hung on to 
second with the game won. It was the old, the 
only situation, of course, and comes to every 
player; I mention it for the something that was 
in the air for me as I slid to second — something 
choked me. The enthusiasm of the team, the 
winning, the extreme need and precise manner 
of the fulfilment, gave me a momentary sense of 

[63] 



MIDSTREAM 



conquest that has never exactly been duplicated. 

My mother's health improved so that she could 
relieve me of the work of the house, but she never 
resumed teaching. I was mowing lawns at this 
time ; practically all the lawns of a city block, and 
had begun to carry papers. This newspaper 
route was an extraordinary affair. I wonder that 
such things could be. I left school at three- 
thirty and walked downtown, a distance of two 
and one-half miles to the press room of an after- 
noon daily. There, I crammed into a bag one 
hundred and twenty-five papers, eight and often 
twelve pages each. Beginning almost immedi- 
ately after leaving the office, I worked swiftly 
for the next two hours up the central thorough- 
fare on one side, and half way, in all the side 
streets, to the next avenue. I reached home 
shortly after six, after doing the second and light 
half of the route largely at a run. The distance 
was easily twelve miles. For nearly two years, 
I continued this six evenings the week, for the 
sum of five dollars monthly. Yet it didn't hurt 
me; didn't tire me after the first month; gave me 
lungs and legs, and doubtless kept down the soft- 
ness and dreaming so dangerous to a lad of my 
kind. It was not until I had been graduated for 
high school at fourteen that I gave up the route. 

School, to this time, had been a matter merely 
of hours and attendance. I seldom thought of 
it except when actually there. I passed from 

[64] 



NEW HOUSE 



grade to grade in a sort of blur, giving no thought 
to lessons out of school. Whipping had begun 
to pass from favour, but I did not miss the ex- 
perience. I respected the principal who rat- 
tanned me. She was an Irish woman straight as 
a spindle, and I dreaded a brush with her. Win- 
tergreen was uncorked one day, just a little before 
my graduation. A girl became ill from the 
odour. I was sent to the principal on suspicion. 
The novelty of innocence was an experience. I 
did not know who brought the stuff to school, 
and after I had repeated this several times in 
the office, she left me there. 

It appears that she stared the class upstairs 
out of countenance — until facts squirmed forth 
upon the features of the guilty one. A certain 
Harry was brought down in a much depressed 
state, following confession. . . . On the last day 
of school, she sent for me, and said: 

"You haven't been a good boy. You've given 
us lots of trouble, but we can forget that, because 
you are not a liar." 

That was luck, for I was a liar. Yet it was 
one of the best things that happened to me ; there 
was a tingle about it that helped me for a time, 
not to be a random liar, at least. I was clean 
of telling tales, nothing more; and it was some- 
thing that my Uncle Will had said to me that 
had kept my mouth shut on several occasions. 
That woman did me good, whipping and all. 

[65] 



9 
INTIMATIONS 



WHILE we still lived in the old house, 
a boy had been killed in the practice 
of a tumbling act. A summer 
dusk, four or five boys on Walt's 
lawn, and one fell upon his neck and shoulders. 
He arose presently and staggered home — to fever, 
delirium, and a swift end that silenced us all. 
At the funeral, it was somehow borne to me that 
he was thirteen. Soon afterward I suffered a 
vision that I should die in my thirteenth year. 

From then on, I prayed daily that this should 
not come to pass, believing that the thirteenth 
year comprised the twelve months following the 
birthday. I entered upon this period with dark 
foreboding. There was not a day until I had 
actually begun on my fifteenth year, that this 
death element was not a part. The last night 
I "thanked the Lord" exultantly. 

The idea of prayer to a personal God was in- 
herent. It is not a pleasant conception now — 
this asking for personal needs on the knees, and 

T66] 



INTIMATIONS 



placating with praise — and yet, far better that, 
than detachment on the part of boy or youth, 
from the sense of relation with the Unseen. 

After exceptional cases of evil conduct, com- 
mon justice forced me, when asking to be absolved 
from something done, to make a vow to do bet- 
ter. I do not recall breaking any of these vows; 
but in the main, the broad-day deviltries were 
not restrained by the better self who suffered for 
them in the nights. . . . Walt had been brought 
up to pray, but it was not so intense a system 
with him — a perfunctory flopping to the knees 
before getting into bed. At least, this is the way 
it seemed. I should be deeply surprised if it 
were otherwise; but one can not be sure. For 
instance, I confided to no one my steady con- 
sciousness of a saving and retributive agency. 

Detachment was begun from some of the per- 
nicious accomplishments of lower Lincoln Ave- 
nue, though I had relapses, occasional fits of 
thievery and other abominations. Leather goods 
fascinated me. I was caught stealing a pair of 
soft leather gloves, and there was a miserable 
month in our house. The suffering helped to cure 
me. I lived a several-life if ever boy did. 

There was the school-boy, the voracious reader, 
the lawn-cutter and paper-carrier, who gave his 
money to his mother, and of whom the neigh- 
bours spoke with pride and pleasure; there was 
the ball-player and bare-back performer, smelling 

[67] 



MIDSTREAM 



of horse, and keen for a chance to ride; the oc- 
casional thief, cigarette-smoker and climber of 
tower-lights; the queer small ruffian to whom the 
dusk brought dreams of the prairie, the herds, 
gun-fighting and night-raids, to whom physical 
courage was the highest attribute of man, and 
to whom ^oman was somehow identified with 
heaven and not with earth. And there was still 
the other, who paid for every evil with remorse 
and prayer — praying secretly to a personal God, 
to be cleared from temptation, cleansed from the 
effects of evil actions and profaning thoughts. 

I had not learned how to study in the gram- 
mar schools; nor had I been called upon to ex- 
press myself in written words during that eight 
years' course. Yet in that period, there was no 
beauty, no experience of importance, nor any 
great bit of reading, that did not start within me 
a curious producing instinct. I recall an Indian 
play, called The White Chief \ partly written be- 
fore I left lower Lincoln; then the first spring 
at the new house, there was a queer study of 
flower-beds and boyish aspirations which ran 
through several chapters. I have mentioned 
Bare-back Bill, the Boy Rider, which grew to 
a formidable manuscript, before it became too 
much for me. The family recognised my bent, 
and I shall never forget a remark of my brother 
on the subject. He was six years older, and 
could "make anything." His artistry with ham- 

[68] 



INTIMATIONS 



mer, nails and a good pocket-knife, was the won- 
der of the neighbourhood. He rigged a bench 
in the cellar ; it was here that I told him one day 
of the certain story I was writing. 

"You'll be a great writer some day," he said, 
with peculiar self-immolation, "and where'll I be 
then? Just a wood-butcher — " 

There was a depth of kindness I shall never 
forget, but the sorrow of it was almost equal. 
He could grant me a future above my dreams, 
and at the same time detach himself from any 
ideal out of the common. 

The point is this: I had begun to write at 
six, was never far from some idea relating to 
it, yet I reached the rhetoric classes of high school, 
aged fourteen, without knowing anything about 
commas, periods, paragraphs and the like. Now 
I could have learned swiftly any rudiment that 
had to do with writing, and I object to the com- 
mon school education covering eight years, that 
failed to find out my strength. 

In my first rhetoric work, I tried to connect 
the sentences by "which's" and "however's" to a 
proper paragraph length, before hammering home 
a period; in short, I was under the delusion that 
a period should not appear in the middle of a para- 
graph. With all my reading I had not looked 
close enough at book construction, to spare me 
from brutalising my own efforts with ill-balanced 
clauses and phrases. In writing I must have 

[69] 



MIDSTREAM 



avoided the evil, in sheer unconsciousness of the 
little implements and mannerisms by the way. 
After a bad mark or two on their account, I iden- 
tified them for all time. 

I was small, pimpled, belonged to the poorer 
element, walked home and to school, had no 
money for lunch at recess — and was made to 
realise continually these shortages. I considered 
myself inferior in every way except in writing, 
but I had no reason to know, that secretly flaming 
under many another suffering breast, was a death- 
less ambition like mine. 

High school sank into the humdrum misery 
of other things. The second term, I narrowly 
missed failure in three studies and did fail in two. 
This put the idea of finishing the course out of 
mind. In my own fancy I began to be a spe- 
cialist; and yearned positively to show quality 
somewhere. I was not answering myself, nor 
any of the reasons for being. It was in this vague 
restlessness that I undertook Greek, the hardest 
study in the school, under what proved the best 
teacher I ever faced. His name was Sherrard, 
and he was a Soul. 

First of all, he was a taskmaster. He put 
fear into me. I worked for him; I got the 
Greek, and it was harder for me because I had 
been indifferent in Latin. That semester gave 
me the first sensation of movement of the brain. 
I began to see how head-work was done; nat- 

[70] 



INTIMATIONS 



urally the first thing that was affected was my 
passion for writing. 

An essay at this time came with singular flu- 
ency. The doing was a thrall ; in it I met a mys- 
terious peace. I saw that other things might 
slip ; that all but Greek and essays might slip, yet 
all would be well; I saw that in spite of what 
any one might say to the contrary, all would be 
well. I have often wondered what would have 
happened to me — had I met understanding from 
some one at this time. Sherrard would have un- 
derstood, but he was a busy man, a sick man, 
too. It was a school of thousands. Perhaps it 
was better for me as it was ; for my especial niche, 
it was right; yet I know this: Had some wise 
man taken me at this time for experimental de- 
velopment of my specialty, I should have gone 
very fast under his care, and been spared much 
wretchedness. 

To my dismay and alarm, the essay just men- 
tioned was marked merely "Good." The system 
ran, "Excellent, Good, Fair, Unsatisfactory, 
Poor." No errors were noted on the copy, when 
it was returned to me. I knew that the quality 
of idea and composition was unusual. Either 
this was so, or I was insane, and this world, 
hell. 

Shortly afterward upon assembling in the 
rhetoric class, the teacher ordered us to put books 
aw r ay, and to write an essay upon the subject now 

[71] 



MIDSTREAM 



given. Forty minutes of production under her 
eye, a session of the purest teaching I ever en- 
countered in school, but so extraordinary to the 
class, that many of the best students balked. 
They had no props, no preparation, no precedents. 
All the plan of study was whipped from under. 
Model girls, lessons invariably prepared, were out 
in strange elements. It was a great hour for me. 
I felt that death were better than to be caught 
common in this trial. 

This was the answer to my former essay, as 
I learned afterward. The mark "Good" was 
tentative, put there on suspicion that my work 
was stolen. I turned in the watched production, 
and it was found exceptional. 

Greek went on. During the last year at 
school, I did essays for a half-dozen students and 
without a pang for the cheating. So much for 
lower Lincoln beginnings. The fact is I took 
deep pleasure in playing with the rhetoric classes. 
It was not always the work, however, to do these 
marketable essays too well. For instance a stu- 
dent in his third year, whose record throughout 
was unsatisfactory, would draw instant suspicion 
if he handed in an essay designed for the Excellent 
mark. So I had to lower the character of the 
service. The fact is, I agreed to get the mark 
desired — Fair, Good, Excellent — to order, at the 
rate of five cents the hundred words. I have 
found that it works much the same in the world; 

[72] 



INTIMATIONS 



that those who profess to hold the pulse of the 
public, often insist that "Fair" is all the pub- 
lic can stand. 

I remember writing a half-dozen essays on the 
one subject, "Portia: A Character Study"; and 
another full set on "The Three Caskets." My 
mother was much interested in the essay work, 
and confided afterward that she had watched me 
one afternoon preparing a certain appreciated re- 
sult. I might have stolen anything but the stuff 
of writing. It was Greek with Sherrard that ex- 
panded my skull, and first let my brain breathe. 

A fellow student who lived opposite was very 
interesting and friendly at this time. He had 
ample car fare and spending money at all times, 
so that I had to avoid him on account of a gen- 
erosity I could never return. His family was a 
remarkable establishment — a house of happiness 
— open to innumerable friends. His younger sis- 
ter had not interested me, but an older one 
seemed all that woman could be. She was sweet 
and Irish (her father also a nobleman risen from 
the peasantry in the next county to my grand- 
father) of sound w r it and unfathomable sweet- 
ness. I was going to say that my brother liked 
her, but it was more than that. One evening 
before dark, I talked with her for a few minutes. 
It was just the time in our lives when the dif- 
ference of two or three years, made the difference 
between a boy and a woman. She told me about 

[73] 



MIDSTREAM 



all the babies she knew, and what they had said. 
She quoted them inimitably, our faces close to- 
gether. Suddenly I remembered that there had 
been young onions for supper. 

"I had forgotten," said I, drawing away. 

"I hadn't," said she. 

Another day, I saw the man who had come to 
marry her. He had been a great student, a foot- 
ball player of reputation, and had taken up the 
career of teacher. There was no doubt in my 
mind about his being a fine man, but I resented 
his coming. 

Playing ball one afternoon at Belle Isle I was 
asked to take part in a second game. The new 
comers, local street railway men, were raw but 
full of enthusiasm. I caught for them through 
a practice game, and was offered a position in 
the downtown offices, so that I could play with 
the team. My mother did not insist on refusal, 
for we were in need; still she treasured a hope 
that my school days were not ended. The posi- 
tion which was given me by the company was 
not exactly what I expected; in fact, I was put 
on the elevator at three dollars the week. 

Manipulating that old hydraulic lift was but 
one of many activities. I kept up the Greek for 
several months; did some writing and drinking; 
studied girls, and burned car tickets. The drink 
shop was next door, and there were lunches there. 
The girls were ticket-counters who worked on the 

[74] 






INTIMATIONS 



third floor of the office suite, some twenty of 
them, and rode up and down with me four times 
a day. I was well treated and had a happy time, 
but many evils developed. 

This car ticket burning was a tempting feature. 
It was conducted under the eye of the manager 
of the ticket-counters, and he was a good man. 
There was a brick furnace, the electric mechan- 
ism of which I never understood, though I op- 
erated it. The large part of the day's supply 
of tickets collected on the cars, was already 
punched by the conductors, but there were some 
hundreds used daily in exchange, on a rival line, 
that were turned in whole. These were counted 
by two or three of the girls of tried integrity. 
The weakness of the plan for their destruction 
must be laid at the door of the good man who 
trusted me. 

The brick work in the long neck of the fur- 
nace was very faulty inside, and easily clogged. 
I found that in removing one of the bricks, a 
ledge remained into which several hundred of 
the unplugged tickets might be thrust at each 
burning. I did not realise how I was hurting 
myself; nor what a despicable thing it was to 
betray the confidence of a man who held me in 
honour. The thought that made this possible 
was that I was taking a few needed dollars from 
a very rich corporation. It was necessary to 
climb over the transom to the office-room in the 

[75] 



MIDSTREAM 



evening, to rescue the smoky packages of tickets 
from the niche. 

I did not do well with them. Having a quan- 
tity of anything, the same lost value in my eyes. 
My own city transportation was provided by the 
company. There was obviously no explanation 
for my possession of car tickets in quantity. I 
dared confide to no one. The fact is, Walt's 
generalship was not at hand. Drinking in- 
creased; I was seventeen and addicted to ciga- 
rettes and dreams of clothes. . . . Just half-way 
to now, and driving straight afield. 

There was a story on the hangers at this time 
that covered weeks in the building — A Despotic 
Destiny. It gave me high hours. I put it on 
a. typewriter at least twice, hunting each letter, 
and using but one hand. It had the low red 
glare of downtown nights in it, the bleakest ani- 
mal conception of life. A woman moved there, 
and wrought her misunderstanding tragically. 
The manuscript travelled two or three times, and 
then was taken by a little publication for ten 
dollars, received a year later. 

At this time, I got the dream of newspaper 
reporting; and though it seemed too great a thing 
for me, an elevator boy was spoiled. If I could 
earn ten dollars in writing after hours, surely I 
could earn twelve dollars a month writing all 
the time at home; so I left the street railway 
office, applied for newspaper work, and had my 

[76] 



INTIMATIONS 



days to write; my mother willing to take a 
chance with me, even in our poverty. It was the 
first of many jobs I lost to write at home. 

I missed the town and the little money, but 
wrote and wrote. The second story sent away, 
I never saw or heard of again. I tried to sell 
things to newspapers, but could not get them 
read with any regularity. At this time I heard 
the story of a woman disciple of Swami Vive- 
kananda. She was preparing for illumination in 
the silence and winter solitude of an island, in 
one of the Michigan interior lakes. The story 
seemed very clear and full to me; but was done 
without much hope and delivered to a Detroit 
newspaper. 

That was a wintry afternoon of early dark- 
ness. I heard the presses throbbing below, and 
smelled that inimitable warm ink and paper at- 
mosphere, but something kept warning me, "It 
is not yours yet; you have not yet earned the 
right to these delights." I was told to come back 
the second day. 

The city editor was the greatest of beings. In 
many ways he was very much of a man, this O. C. 
— huge, handsome, brisk, an individual, a scraggy 
little dog at his feet. . . . He looked at me, 
beckoned me to a seat, and then drew forth my 
manuscript from a desk corner. Something the 
way my heart had turned to Uncle Will, it 
turned now in awakened hope to O. C. All that 

[77] 



MIDSTREAM 



I had known downtown before was unlike this 
(in my riotous ideality). Here was Man; here 
was the artist, the writer man — as he should be, 
the beauty of the Greek upon him. 

"Did you write this?" 

"Yes," I said, in fear that I might have done 
a very evil thing. 

"How old are you? . . . And what are you 
doing?" 

"I'm writing." 

I divulged tfhe Despotic Destiny, and added, 
"I am waiting for a position with you. I applied 
weeks ago." 

"Good God, did you?" he said. "I ought to 
look to those things more." 

He took a pencil and crossed out my large and 
laboured introduction, covering the first page, 
asking questions how I got the story. 

"It's a hell of a good story," said he. "We'll 
use it." 

I thanked him — brokenly, I'm afraid. When 
I was half-way across the city room, he called: 

"Comfort." 

It was not the last time it sounded across the 
editorial floor. I seemed to know this, hurrying 
back. 

"Did you leave your address?" 

"It's with the application." 

"Write it here." 

He gave me a sheet of copy paper. 
[78] 



INTIMATIONS 



"Pll send for you, when I need you." 

"Thank you/ 5 

And then alone in the darker hall, I smelled 
the warm inky air again. It was nearer; I loved 
all men and things. . . . I was close to being 
run over, crossing the streets on the way home. 



[79] 



io 
STRAWBERRIES 



OC. sent for me within a week; and put 
me at a table in his office. 
"In a newspaper story/' said he, 
• "write the answer to questions you 
would ask, if you were deeply interested in some 
happening another had just seen. Make it crisp. 
Hammer your sentences home. The last sen- 
tence of a paragraph should be a brace for all — 
a crosspiece." 

Presently I was running to and fro in a daze 
— doing, doing. Daze is characteristic of mine in 
the midst of fresh and vital things — loss of the 
sense of passing hours and deep absorption. 

Never a question asker, it was easier for me 
to risk answering questions that I had not asked. 
I was never to be a star reporter on this account. 
Facts were foreigners; I was a liar in training. 
There were no rights of man in the world for 
me — beyond the word of O. C. at the city desk, 
I knew nothing of the paper's politics or policy, 
but his word was my law. I could silence any 

[80] 



STRAWBERRIES 



injustice at his suggestion. This is one of the 
atrocities of the time ; that a cub-reporter without 
judgment, vision, fixed morality, or any but glib 
values, has a certain power of place in a munici- 
pality. O. C. was square and very much a man, 
but the situation exists, and all city editors are 
not of his sort. 

He was unvaryingly good; saw something of 
the velocity of my ambition and used it. There 
is no doubt about my adoration. I did very well 
as feature writer and "general assignment" man. 
One laughable adventure was tragedy at the time. 
O. C. sent me to Mt. Clemens to do a banquet 
. . . summer afternoon and evening; a hun- 
dred men in the flush of trade, stories and stim- 
ulus; excellent wine and food; boat rides and 
moonlight; and overtopping all for me, the mar- 
vel that this was work; that this which I saw 
and enjoyed required only be told; that all 
things had come to me, since that which I must 
do to live, was what I must do to live. I had 
found my work. What I loved to do, sustained 
my body to serve it. I drank freely and kept 
quiet, studied my own sensations with the same 
joy that I regarded exterior things. 

Now, the man who owned my paper was there, 
the Shipbuilder. He was a Scot, very healthy, 
very rich, a banker, identified with shipping and 
construction interests on the Great Lakes. 
Bearded in iron grey, erect and small-eyed, he 

[81] 



MIDSTREAM 



stood at the head of the table and addressed the 
company. I scarcely listened; certainly a man 
would not want to be reported in his own paper. 

I pitied him. A man who owned a paper, and 
couldn't be a reporter on it. I would not have 
changed with him for all his ships and banks. 
He could not know O. C. as I knew him — O. C. 
the good of the world to me. 

Next morning early, I turned in my story for 
the first edition. O. C. used to come down and 
get things started, and then retire for breakfast. 
It was so this morning. The first edition was 
on the street when he returned, my story of the 
banquet appearing — all that I could ask, uncut 
and flowery to suit. (I lived from day to day; 
indeed my vitality rose and fell according to the 
quantity of my work which appeared, as writ- 
ten.) O. C. was called to the Shipbuilder's 
room. The door opened after several moments; 
I heard this: 

"If I have to let Comfort go, I'll go, too." 

The door was shut again. O. C. emerged 
after a second period and took his seat at the 
desk, I watching him in the thrall of fear. He 
turned at last. 

"How could you do it?" he asked. 

"What?" 

"Miss the old man's speech at the banquet?" 

"Why, I — I didn't want it. I didn't think 
he would want it — in his own paper." 

[82] 



STRAWBERRIES 



O. C. flung his arms about his head. ... I 
had said something unanswerable. I didn't 
know it at the time. I thought he was grieved 
and disappointed in me. I could not know then 
that he was an innocent like myself; that he 
would always forget through life, even as I, that 
Trade is on the opposite side of the moun- 
tain. . . . What I saw most clearly was that 
there was a crack in my dream; that my position 
was precarious; that O. C.'s was, too, because of 
me. And I had asked no more of life than this. 
I loved the paper, the building, the boards of 
the floor, composers, pressmen. I had watched 
the crime-reporter drumming at his machine — a 
twelve-dollar a week man, while I was drawing 
six or eight — and vowed in my heart that I would 
take his price for life. It was enough with such 
happiness. 

But the crack did not break; weeks passed and 
I caught on better and better; my assignments 
rising in importance and compelling more and 
more space. Night life, however, at this time 
was becoming more and more destructive. For- 
merly the editorial end of newspaper work was 
much more closely identified with alcohol. 
Older men rose and fell, holding weakly to their 
little past brilliance. The best of those in their 
prime just above me, were hard-living, hard- 
drinking men, without homes. These were my 
companions. One who loved Hugo suffered 

[83] 



MIDSTREAM 



much of my companionship, though I was not 
twenty. He was like Walt in many ways, kept 
his head, talked his way in and out, without los- 
ing temper, saw life through a film of Les Miser- 
ables pictures, and ate what was nearest at hand, 
so long as there was occasional whiskey and con- 
stant cigarettes. I was never like that. Whis- 
key would not keep its place in my conscious- 
ness. After certain indulgence, it prevailed. 
When I took a drink it was with the thought of 
the next. He used to lecture me on my flimsy 
self-command. 

Among my earlier assignments was a set of 
religious meetings in a remote part of the city of 
which I made somewhat a feature, quoting the 
"experiences" and the more fiery portions of the 
sermons. These meetings ran for thirty days. 
A certain woman used to smile at me. She had 
wonderful eyes. We met, and walked home to- 
gether. Once or twice I went in to her house. 
We had strange silences. She was at least fif- 
teen years older. When she spoke, it was of the 
meetings and of her zeal for me to be better; 
yet these nights were profoundly emotional. 
There were moments in which I seemed to sense 
her unspeakable torture. That churchly thing 
withheld me. She was silent, strange — and I very 
young. I am glad it was so, but there is a 
tragedy about it. . . . She was one of many who 

[84] 



STRAWBERRIES 



realise the loveliness of life too late — who dream 
and are changed. 

A little group of us — the crime-reporter, who 
afterward became congressman, the Hugo-lover 
and one or two others — used to gather at a mil- 
liner's house. Certain young women were usu- 
ally present. Morals were not taut exactly, but 
neither were they broken. The memory of those 
evenings is not unpleasant, but there was, I ven- 
ture, a sleep-late demoralisation upon the house. 
One evening as we were singing, a woman came 
in. She was the most perfect creature I had 
ever seen; so pretty (I called it beauty then), 
that it did not occur to me to rise and be made 
known to her, when the others were introduced. 

I did not hear her name. She sat, her frail 
back and yellow hair to me. She played a lit- 
tle, as she talked ; her words did not come to me, 
nor what the others said, only the ravishing sense 
of her loveliness. Presently she was gone. It 
was early in the evening; she went alone. I was 
subdued; the house palled. I went home. I 
did not ask her name. 

A month afterward, with a certain older re- 
porter, I was on the big general feature of a ma- 
sonic meet. The paper went to press at three, 
with almost the entire front page done between 
us. There had been champagne all day, but the 
movement and the intense activity of mind, had 

[85] 



MIDSTREAM 



kept the fumes from unsteadying me. Even in 
the leisure afterward, when we sat down in a 
buffet to talk it over, I was normal and pleas- 
antly athirst. 

My companion of this day had been closer 
than ever before. He had won my admiration, 
had helped me in every way he could. Just 
now, he seemed to see in me, a most unsettling 
future for himself. He became sad as we talked 
together; the sadness was of a nature that stir- 
ringly appealed, for as he expressed it: "You 
are coming into all that I'm losing." A man 
even in drink who gathers wreckage about him- 
self, and sets a boy on top of it — is sure of a 
listener. Yet in his picture of my makng good, 
there was the tragedy of his passing. It hurt 
like that remark of my brother at the work-bench 
in the cellar. 

Before dark, he became loosened and vague, 
asking almost as a last thing, for me to go home 
with him. I would have done that. . . . And 
now I am telling you of a June night about seven, 
and still daylight. We walked the mile to his 
house. I entered with him. He passed ahead, 
into the dark hall. A woman's voice began, but 
was quickly hushed. He repeated my name, and 
announced that he would lie down until supper 
was ready. The woman came forward. In the 
light of the doorway where I still was standing, 
I saw the woman who had called at the mil- 

[86] 



STRAWBERRIES 



liner's house. ... At the supper table, I refused 
strawberries. She looked at me saying that she 
had stemmed them, and that they were especially 
good. ... It rained. The man asked me to 
stay for the night, sent a messenger to my house, 
and brought some bottled beer with him when 
he came back. Even that was secondary. He 
went to sleep on the sofa again. . . . She was 
playing in the darkened front room; I behind her, 
as it was in the beginning. She turned to me, 
her fingers still playing. 

I had no words. I did not even think of him. 
I only saw her, and knew the wonder of her 
turning to me. . . . Then it was later, and we 
were upstairs, she showing me the room where 
I was to sleep. She went in first, lit the gas, 
turned it so it would not flare, touched the pil- 
lows, separated the coverings, went to the win- 
dow, and drew the shade down; then turned. I 
was still standing in the doorway, watching her. 

My hands stretched out to the door-frame; she 
came forward slowly to me, her eyes holding 
mine. Very close she came until my arms fell 
about her. She tarried but a second. I thought 
I should never know another such instant. I 
awoke to sunlight after rain, and lay there for 
a time, listening for her step below. 



[87] 



11 
PISTOL 



I MUST have taken away from her house 
in the morning some assurance of seeing 
her again. ... It was afternoon. A 
note from her was in my hands. I 
thought it could not be true, for the writing was 
childish. It told me to meet her at once in the 
milliner's house. 

She was there — in brown — the sunlight pen- 
cilling the walls and floors through the imper- 
fectly fitted shades. She was angry at something 
the milliner had said, before I arrived. She said 
that we must never see each other again. 

I had expected that. All I knew of the world 
made me realise the inevitability of her saying 
just that. I believed it. She went forth with 
me, as the dusk was coming on; she asked me to 
walk ahead so she could look at me. I obeyed 
reluctantly. She arranged to meet me across the 
river the next afternoon. 

I went home. Nothing downtown held me, 
neither the crime-reporter, nor the Hugo-lover. 

[88] 



PISTOL 



The rest was reason, until I walked with her 
again. We parted in the dusk across the river, 
I taking the second ferry and dreaming of the 
coming day, when we should meet again. 

One afternoon dusk, several days later, she 
would not have me wait for a later ferry, but 
bade me cross the river with her. We walked 
up through the city together, and most of the 
distance to her house. She halted at last and 
said : 

"I can't stay there another night. I will go 
and tell him. Then I'll cross the river again — 
to-night. Watch for me at the Homestead. 
Don't mind if it's late. I will come." 

... I did wait long. It was a turning- 
point for me, but I hardly thought of that. I 
watched the cars. There was not a moment in 
which I believed fully that she would come, not 
even when she said it; and yet, I waited and 
waited and watched the cars. The Homestead 
was down the river; the cars fifteen minutes 
apart. Between each car I slowly drank a tall 
shell of ale. Sometimes it seemed I was out on 
a great story—the losing of which meant the com- 
ing of a woman. For once in my life I was ready 
to betray the Story. I was ready to die to have 
her come, indeed to betray the Story meant the 
same thing— a readiness for death. 

The time did not drag so long between cars. 
I seemed cool and comfortable, all faculties set 

[89] 



MIDSTREAM 



in order; yet the little Canadian barroom was 
not so bright to my eyes. . . . There were two 
cars more; one was coming. It was almost 
empty — an open car like the others, with only 
three or four people in it. I saw the figures, not 
the faces. The car turned slightly along the 
river road and stopped. 

My eyes were not doing their part. I did not 
see her step down. Her hand was upon my arm. 

'Tm so sorry you had to drink," she said. 

I was broken, beyond words. She had done 
this thing; she was there beside me, the car gone, 
the single light on the porch of the Homestead 
opposite, and the warm moonless night about us. 
. . . She was very tired. There had been a 
scene. He was following, had threatened to kill 
us both. Some friend of his was with him. Her 
coming had made me see clearly what was gone. 
Not that I would have had it changed; not that 
I regretted the price. Only I saw other things 
with clearness now. 

Hastening along the dark road, we turned into 
the first lane toward the river. The boats were 
going up and down, the big lake freighters — 
green lights down-bound with the current to Erie, 
and the red lights up-bound to St. Clair and 
Huron. The channel was very close to us. . . . 
I wonder if she sensed that the serpent enters 
Eden when a man stops to think. 

She was carrying a little pistol. I laughed 
[90] 



PISTOL 



and drew it from her. The thing was loaded, 
but it was such a little gun. 

"Suppose you take it and kill me, 55 she said, 
"then kill yourself/' 

I had no thought of her seriousness. "You 
take it and kill me first/' I replied. 

She placed the gun under my coat. I could 
not see her face, did not like it there, brushed it 
away. 

"You would live a long time," she whispered, 
"if you waited for me to kill you." 

O. C. was out for breakfast when I reached 
the office. The managing editor came toward me, 
head down and hard faced. I had something 
coming from the cashier, he said. I was not sur- 
prised, but crushed. It hurt more in the day, 
than I had thought possible in the night. I 
wanted to see her, too, but had no idea where 
she was. ... I went back toward noon to the 
office, with a wordless yearning for something 
from O. C, and the thought of her message that 
was to come. 

He was out again. There was no message. I 
stopped to talk for a moment with a reporter. 
The managing editor came forward to me again, 
his head down, his eyes holding me with a hard- 
ness that I see now. 

"You have no business around here," he said. 

That afternoon she did send for me, but the 
message was not delivered, for I was not at the 

[91] 



MIDSTREAM 



office, nor at home. I waited for the Hugo-lover 
at his usual place of resort, but it was dusk before 
he came. He told me that the woman had shot 
herself, but had done a poor job of it; that she was 
calling for me at the hospital. 

I backed away from him. He asked where I 
was going. 

"To the hospital." 

"You couldn't get within a city block of 
there," he said. 

I sat down on something nearby. 

"Let's have a drink," he said presently. 

I arose and joined him. It seemed to me that 
I had no other friend. The great need of him 
that moment, made me know his evening could 
not be given to me. It came soon afterward : 

"Sorry, I can't see you to-night." 

I went out into the street, and wandered. I 
was not even athirst. I walked past the hos- 
pital, looked at the lit windows, wondering in 
which room a woman called for me. . . . Sit- 
ting on the curb in the darkness at a distance, 
I thought of home. It was as if I had been years 
away — I thought of my mother and father and 
brother. I recalled that my father had been at 
his best when I left, in the midst of a lull be- 
tween his battles. I arose and went across the 
city to my house. . . . 

My father looked up from his reading. 

"Your mother has been worrying," he said. 

[92] 



PISTOL 

She heard my voice and hastened in. 

I do not know what I said. 

"Surely you don't have to go out again to- 
night?" she asked. 

"No. Oh ? no." 

I could not tell them now that I was off the 
paper. It seemed as if I must stay right there 
— just sit in the midst of them, and not speak. 
Everything in the world, every place in the 
world, was unreal. Sitting there with them un- 
der the lamp, I met the old miracle of a mother's 
unquestioning gladness in her son's return. . . . 
I held to that— sitting near her, without words 
—as one would hold a rare gift in his hands. 



[93] 



12 

CINCINNATI 



IN the house we now occupied, there was a 
low, unfinished third floor. I fitted a desk 
there, and the morbid condition of mind 
turned me to verse. I have often noted 
how emotional unrestraint enforces a lyrical form 
of expression, even though sense and direction 
are tortured. Such a siege I had in that attic 
with emotional and unprofitable verse, that I was 
spared afterward, except from very occasional in- 
dulgences. A certain rhythm starts, and carries 
the idea for a few measures. Beyond that my 
mind turns lame now, and the processes are hate- 
ful — the truckling of thought to form. The 
more I think about work, the more clearly it ap- 
pears to me that any set form is but a crutch for 
the weak. The thought in the mind is the whole 
business of the expression. According to the ex- 
actness of the parallel between the thought and 
the utterance, is the value. 

. . . All the roads turned cityward for my 

[94] 



CINCINNATI 



eyes; especially did they draw me, as night came 
on, moving downward like swift streams. But 
I had nothing for the City, neither money to travel 
alone, nor companions who held a place for me. 
The words and the look of the managing editor 
would wake me with sweating in the night. 
O. C. had not found it possible to get me on an- 
other local paper. The woman of the strawber- 
ries—how queerly I came to think of her with 
those first words at the supper table — had made 
rapid recovery and returned to her home. It was 
a period of darkness. Evil was restrained, but 
not my eagerness for it. I could not hold the 
high sense of home that had come to me in the 
burning of fatigue and the bitter stresses. I had 
no thought to do any other than newspaper work. 
The verses were but of the senses, and brought 
me none of the replenishment of higher labour. 
I see something of the young bull dog in that 
boy-man of nineteen — out and down from the 
fighting, pried and beaten off, whipped and 
locked up — but looking out of his prison with the 
same low concentration, living upon the fight, 
thirsting for its renewal. 

Nothing that would appeal to me now, could 
have changed me then. I was atrocious. I 
wanted money to drink with — money to take my 
place among men — money in case the woman 
called; money, in short, to go to the devil. No 

[95] 






MIDSTREAM 



one knows the need of money, until he is caught 
and crippled in the passions of the senses. Thus 
caught, one is insulated from reality. 

My mother had a sublime patience — so long 
as I was at the writing. We were incredibly 
poor, I an added burden, but there was no pro- 
test while I wrestled with verses — that I hid from 
her eyes. I almost hesitate to write it — the thing 
is so trite and pitiful — those were the suicidal 
days. The end of my Uncle Tom was much in 
mind; and one does not brood upon this subject 
to any length without an apparition of the fas- 
cinating ease of the thing. If the thought fully 
forms, one must reckon with it afterward. 

I have not thought of those attic days, as now, 
for many years. It is good to be held to them 
by this writing, for I can see better what is about 
me. Had I been called a month ago to such a 
one in his attic; and been given to see as deeply 
into his perversion, as I see now into mine own 
of those days, — I might have washed my hands 
of him in disgust, saying: 

"I can not make him understand. Others 
more ready to understand, are for me. This 
creature is caught in such vile and obvious devil- 
tries. He hasn't even learned the shallow nasti- 
ness of night pavements. He wants money to 
go back to the muck. He burns with lust and 
calls it love; he wallows in turgid expressions 
of desire and calls it poetry. He yearns for the 

[96] 



CINCINNATI 



downtown bars — thinking to take his place among 
men there/' 

A man is at his worst, when he begins to choose 
whom he shall help; when he gathers together 
an elect, saying: "Upon these shall I bestow my 
goods." Human business is to help the nearest; 
and when one says of a sufferer: "This creature 
is too far down for me to understand," he sends 
forth the perfect call to be tested in such depths. 
If he has already passed through them, he chal- 
lenges a return of such low miseries, for one is 
only finished with an evil when he preserves an 
instant understanding of it, and an enveloping 
sympathy for others near and far on the black 
roads behind. Even the bull pup may be turned 
against his instincts, if the understanding of the 
fancier is deep enough. 

One night the current caught me. I knocked 
at G. W.'s door — a reporter whom I had little 
known in the days of companionship with the 
Hugo-lover and the crime-reporter. He wel- 
comed me in a way that stopped my throat. I 
asked only to sit with him, to smoke and talk of 
editorial things. 

"Come on, we'll go out," he said. 

I told him I was broke. 

"I'm not," said he. 

And we went from bar to bar drinking. We 
talked. I lost my shames and fears, saw the fu- 
ture again. He told me high comments from 

[97] 



MIDSTREAM 



O. C. on my work; that all agreed this cloud would 
soon pass. After midnight, G. W. found a place 
that kept open, and where he had credit; after 
some time, we rocked to his room and slept to- 
gether. I love him to this hour. 

Last night, I regarded him, as he sat across the 
room — a clean and a kindly man. Because I 
was writing this, I recalled that night. It was 
all but lost to his memory. A more recent night, 
in which he helped me, was far dearer to his 
fancy. We talked of others of those days — of 
the crime-reporter, the Hugo-lover, and of men 
who have fallen away. 

"G. W.," I said, "they didn't rope you down 
for thirty days to make you quit; yet, you are 
here, better than ever. I call it pretty fine busi- 
ness on your part. You don't drink very much, 
do you?" 

"He doesn't drink at all," said the woman, 
who married him. 

And G. smiled in his happy way. He wanted 
me to hear it just so. They are dear to me. I'd 
go to them again, if I were down. I wrote some- 
where, thinking of them — that a man makes his 
best friends, when his needs are most desperate; 
before the world calls a truce with him. 

A position was obtained by an uncle for me 
on a Cincinnati paper; and I happened to find a 
good story during the first morning's work. I 
had been writing not more than fifteen minutes, 

[98] 



CINCINNATI 



when the city editor looked over my way and 
asked if I were doing a book. ... It was a 
different sort of newspaper work, cheap, nasty, 
sensational, all head and no text — no real chance 
for me. 

The town showed me its worst at once. The 
hotel I lived in was a hazardous bit of the under- 
world, kept by a man for purposes other than 
profit. There was always a set of drained and 
dozy young men in the office — seemingly lost to 
the passage of hours. The proprietor was a 
handsome person with magnificent manner. 
Women guests were discouraged in the estab- 
lishment. He went up with me in the elevator 
one night; I understood before we entered the 
room. ... I found another room downtown. 
All the unkempt bohemia that a decadent could 
yearn for was my environment. 

The office assigned me the police court. For 
several hours each day, I saw human suffering 
at its cheapest, sending in paragraphs and bul- 
letins by messenger. The work drew forth no 
good. Though I did not know it then, I required 
as food, a quality of tasks that tested my limi- 
tations every day. I told one of the men that 
I was working a bit during the evenings on "out- 
side stuff." Presently the managing editor called 
me and said that this was not permitted on his 
paper. I was absurd enough to submit. On 
the third or fourth pay day, as I sat in a barber's 

[99] 



MIDSTREAM 



chair, my salary was stolen from my outer coat. 
I could not pay for board and room, nor send 
anything home. I never caught up after that in 
Cincinnati. My efforts to be decent were not 
manful at best; they flattened out. It was drink 
and cigarettes and the passing call of the street 
— a crazing misery that moved from mad stimula- 
tion to stupor and inertia. . . . Some one had in- 
sulted me. ... I was looking for some one, and 
had an open knife in my overcoat pocket. . . . 

I stopped in the street — Longworth Street in 
'98 — and my hand closed over the open knife. 
Could this be I? 

The picture ran out in my mind, as if the knife 
had been used — I caught, locked up. I saw the 
police court changed, next morning; I, not at the 
reporter's desk, but in the dock, an officer ex- 
plaining what I had done. It all seemed very 
natural. . . . The touch of the open knife had 
shocked and sobered me. I had always hated a 
knife. The next morning I could not recall 
what had been said or who it was that crazed me. 

Prisons are filled with men thus blindly driven 
by energies they do not understand. Drink and 
drugs let down the bars; and destructive forces, 
as foreign to them, as the knife-passion was to 
me, crowd in and gain their ends for a season. 
All self-indulgence is self-destructive. 

When I think of prisons ; of the men who send 
other men there; of chairs of death and hang- 

[100] 



CINCINNATI 



ings, and of all that bring these things about — 
it comes to me that the City is organised hell; 
that there is no end to our cruelty and stupidity. 
I bought from door to door in city streets the stuff 
that makes murder; I sat in the forenoons under 
the corrective forces, which were quite as blindly 
stupid and cruel. 

The women I passed in the night, appeared 
often in the morning. I talked to them in the 
nights, and heard them weep in the days; I saw 
them in the nights with the men who judged them 
in the days. Out of all that evil, there was no 
voice ; out of all the corrective force was no voice. 
The City covered us all. I was one and the 
other. The women thought themselves beasts; 
the men thought themselves men — and, voiceless 
between them, the City stood. 

The most tragic sentence I ever heard, was 
from the lips of one of these women. ... I 
talked with her through the night. She called it 
her work; she had an ideal about her work. 
Every turning in her life had been man-directed. 
She confessed that she had begun with an un- 
abatable passion; that men had found her sensu- 
ousness very attractive when it was fresh. She 
had preserved a certain sweetness, through such 
stresses that the upper world could never credit. 
Thousands of men had come to her; all perver- 
sions, all obsessions, all madness, and drunken- 
ness, to her alone in this little room. She told 

[101] 



MIDSTREAM 



of nights when twenty came. Yet there was 
something inextinguishable about her — some- 
thing patient and optimistic. In the midst of it 
all, it was like a little girl speaking: 

"I wake up in the morning, and find a man be- 
side me. I am always frightened, even yet, — 
until I remember. I remember who I am and 
what I am. . . . Then I try to think what he is 
like — what his companions called him — what he 
said to me. I try to remember how he looked — 
because you know in the morning, his face is al- 
ways turned away." 

Does it help you to see that we are all one? 
. . . Yet I couldn't have seen then, trained by 
men and the City. I belonged to the ranks of 
the corrective forces in the eyes of the City — 
and she, to the destructive. . . . She would have 
gone to the pen, I sitting opposite waiting for 
something more important to make a news bul- 
letin. . . . From the City's point of view, I was 
at large, safe and sane, inasmuch as I had failed 
to find — God knows whom it was — whom I 
wanted to stick a knife into — for God knows 
what. 

The extreme seriousness with which men re- 
gard themselves as municipal correctives — as sol- 
diers, lovers, monopolists — has risen for me into 
one of the most remarkable facts of life. 

I can not close this chapter in Cincinnati. It 
was a hell-portion throughout. They gave me 

[ 102] 



CINCINNATI 



re-write to do at the office finally, and I made 
good at that. I liked the theatre very much, but 
the staff was large, the passes few. It prevailed 
upon me in my demoralisation, that I was not 
even getting my share of these passes. I took 
blank slips from the editor's desk and filled them 
out myself. I was caught about ten days later 
using the last of them. It happened very 
quickly. I came into the office, after luncheon, 
looked up to find the city editor and his assistant 
standing above me, instead of sitting at their 
desks. Something was said about passes, about 
a thief. I answered that I had not had a square 
deal in the theatre disposals. With all Cincin- 
nati had shown me, I was not prepared for what 
happened. In the midst of my sentence, the city 
editor's hand raised above me — the two largest 
fingers forked, pointed at my eyes. 

I did not know what it meant. The fork de- 
scended — but I was spared blinding. The mid- 
dle finger tore the bridge of my nose, and the 
index finger opened the bony corner of my right 
eye. ... I remember his face now. There was 
silence all about. . . . Over night, I succeeded 
in borrowing money to get home. My mother 
was glad to see me. 



[103] 



13 
SOLDIER 



THERE is a hangover to all evil habits 
learned in boyhood. One accustomed 
to lie in early years, will find stress 
later, in which a lie will be flicked 
from him, long after he has grown out of the 
sphere of untruth; in fact, after he has nothing 
but scorn for the possible fruits of lying. In the 
same way, one who has long put away the habit 
of theft, and who in ordinary coolness would be 
removed from anything but the humorous side of 
temptation, may suddenly find himself rushed by 
a set of conditions in which the old facility op- 
erates. 

Though I quickly caught the rhythm of health 
again, the prison house had closed. Very far 
from sensitiveness of early boyhood did I stand; 
and as far from the sensitiveness of manhood. I 
was just twenty. Cincinnati had covered six or 
seven months. O. C. was away; there was not 
yet an opening for me in Detroit. 

Nothing comes to me clearly from the next few 

[ 104] 



SOLDIER 



months, before my enlistment in the regular cav- 
alry, not even if I saw the woman of the straw- 
berries again. I arranged to furnish newspaper 
letters from soldier-service in the Philippines, 
and told my mother about the departure. ... I 
wonder why I pause now— as if to make some- 
thing right. My mother knew that it was no use 
to struggle with me about going away. I felt 
something of her sorrow. My father was in the 
throes of his last descent — my brother away — 
and I leaving her. I could not chronicle such a 
merciless situation in fiction. I should hesitate 
to chronicle the commonness of one being caught 
in the sentimental epidemic of hatred for the 
Spaniard. My mother was left alone in the 
climax of her miseries. 

My troop was supposed to be in San An- 
tonio. ... A shuddery pause in Cincinnati. 
... It was the first of June. There was an 
army officer on the train, of the cavalry by the 
broad yellow tape he wore. I took a seat near 
him and finally spoke, saying with eagerness that 
I was to join troop K. of the Fifth. He did not 
answer. He did not even reprimand me for ad- 
dressing him. It was my first brush with the 
officer-and-man business. My adventure was 
spoiled; patriotism slowed up. Conditions did 
not improve until I smelled the magnolia trees. 

No halt in San Antonio; my troop had left for 
the east, instead of the west. I missed the com- 

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mand in New Orleans, but had a night there in 
the all but empty post; on to Mobile the next 
morning, and presently east again to Tampa. I 
might have expected an explanation regarding 
the change in orders, having been enlisted for 
Philippine service, but the cavalry officer had 
shattered my innocence. I was a hair on a horse's 
back. It was my business to stick if I could — 
through all combings. 

We made our beds between the unheaved pal- 
metto roots at Tampa. I have needed a strong 
rebounding body. A boy's robustness came back 
to me in the first Tampan days — a life of coarse 
food, sleeping out, and horses everywhere. Late 
in the second week, a telegram dispatched from 
Detroit on the day I left, came to hand, having 
followed my curious itinerary among the southern 
and gulf cities. I sat down by the picket-line 
and read of my father's death. He had been 
alone in the house, a duplex. The woman next 
door had heard his hands upon the wall, as he 
made his last journey through the hall. In the 
depths of late years, his mind had often turned 
to his brother's self-destruction. He had prom- 
ised to repeat. I saw his life clearly, as I sat 
there among the horses; and I see it even now 
more clearly. 

That was a vast mobilisation of troops on the 
Tampan plain. The Rough Riders were next 
to us, a noisy undisciplined crowd. Old Captain 

[106] 



SOLDIER 



B of our Troop K. made the remark that he 

could "gut the whole outfit" with his own troop. 
But they got away early, and what a press-agent 
they had. 

The flies began to be a plague by day, and the 
mosquitoes by night. On the fourth of July, I 
won a series of foot-races, beating my troop and 
the squadron selections, but the regimental 
honour was not contested. This gave me a bet- 
ter standing among the men. . . . Their faces 
come back to me — German, Irish, Danish, and 
English — all kneaded by the service into one 
kind, a thing of low humour, narrow conscious- 
ness and sullen hate] all clutched into the distor- 
tion of the system, taught by it and by each other 
that work of any kind is hell — that food, sleep, 
drink and pay are all that make life. 

I was natural in the saddle. We were drill- 
ing with sabres in the cool of the dusk one even- 
ing, when one of a new lot of horses became un- 
manageable. The sergeant ordered me to change 
mounts with the recruit. There was no getting 
the panicky gelding back to the ranks. Up he 
went, striking straight out. I felt him topple, 
tossed the sabre over my shoulder and pushed his 
neck from me, landed on my feet, and re-mounted 
as he rose. The added spectacular flourish of it 
all was from the sabre, quivering hilt up in the 
sand. I had felt showy throughout. . . . 
There were thrilling charges by troop on that 

[107] 



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Tampa plain — "as fast as the slowest horse," and 
no slowest horse. But life in the main was 
hideously slow — slow thoughts, slow actions, 
stupid words, everywhere the affronting of de- 
cency, and the lording it of "pin-head" non-coms. 
I recall as from another life, K/s first-sergeant — 
a dull ruffian named O , and the little officer- 
man G who held himself a god compared 

with us, according to his training. 

The days blackened with flies in July; earth in 
the sinks was deep with maggots ; horses screamed 
at the pickets; the Sibley tents at night were an 
inch deep with flies inside, clinging, crawling more 
tightly together. The slap of the hand would 
loose a thousand, but the. mass eased over to fill 
space. The morning sun dried the reek of them 
on the canvas. 

The cook-house was in a cloud; men tortured 
to madness fought with one another in the mess- 
line. You could not carry your meat from the 
bench to the picket-line without living flakes, from 
the black bank of flies, falling thick upon it; 
you could not fight them from the morsel that 
you lifted to your lips. Flies were there to rush 
into the mouth with it; they were at your eyes 
and nostril linings. We sat down at the heels 
of our mounts to eat, as close as we could to the or- 
bit of the tortured beast's tail. And the breed- 
ing sunlight came down like a curse. 

I have never heard, nor read, nor seen since, 

[108] 



SOLDIER 



anything like those days; yet I relate but the 
shadow of the memory. Shadow, that recalls 
the vultures, forever circling above, their shadows 
moving like ghosts across the sand. . . . 

They kept us there in that compounding pes- 
tilence, the nation looking over our heads to 
Cuba, and offering up more patriots momentarily ; 
Washington too turgid and insensible to hear the 
cry of that which had been ten thousand on the 
Tampa plain; our officers reflecting a funk that 
was national. The forces that ruled us, civil and 
martial, were either stupid or corrupt. We who 
went out to whip Spain died like flies under their 
hands. We thought of the sea and the fighting, 
as one dying of fever thinks of running water. 
We lay in the sun, waiting for ambulances. In 
the great heat we covered ourselves with ponchos 
and with canvas of the tent-walls, to keep off 
the flies. * . . Yet we welcomed every single 
fiery dawn on that Tampan plain, because of the 
higher-pitched agony of the nights. 

In the late afternoons they came. Even while 
the flies were settling, we could see the spirals of 
them in the air, against the background of the 
dusk — the blood-suckers. 

One night I was driven to a blur of agony and 
illusion. I think that blur must be something 
like the remnant of consciousness that lives 
through purgatory. I did not know the men 
about me— onlv that they were men, I sat up 

[109] 



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on the sand in the moonlight — the air and sand 
were burning from the day — and men were carry- 
ing their blankets to and fro, cursing in a kind 
of moan, lying down here and there, whimpering. 
I had a thought — bit a piece from a plug of to- 
bacco, chewed it, and smeared my face and neck 
with the juice, but the blood-suckers found me 
through that. I arose and left the troop-street, 
climbed to the top of a freight-car behind the 
cook-tent — and they found me. The blur thick- 
ened. I had forgotten home. I thought of 
ships — of transports and sea-winds — thought 
only of ship's decks and the sea. 

For days the ambulance had taken from three 
to twelve from K.'s troop-street; it was so, over 
the regiment, over the whole field. I was one of 
the last quarter for sick-report, one of the very 
last of my squad. Troop A. had gone to Porto 
Rico; it was in the air that we were to sail. 
Vaguely I knew something was wrong with me, 
but I meant to stick it out until we sailed; all 
would be well at sea. That was the dream — -to 
lie down on an open deck, where clean air moved, 
with a cask of water near. ... I stood through 
a last roll-call, then broke. I said something to 
somebody. . . . Somebody ordered me to lie 
down. 

Still I thought of the ship; thought it meant 
the ship at last when the ambulance came. (It 
was like a bus full of drunken men.) I remem- 

[no] 



SOLDIER 



ber the sunlight, a strange tent ... the orderly 
telling the surgeon that my fever was a hundred 
and five. I arose from the ground; explained 
that we were sailing that night — that I would be 
all right when we got to sea. They smiled. I 
made up my mind not to argue with them. 
They hadn't heard K. was sailing. K. wouldn't 
go without me. . . . 

I was lying in a different tent — listening to 
the waterfalls. . . . Finally I got all the forces 
of the world to pull together at once and asked 
for a drink. Before me was an assistant hospital 
steward of the regulars. He waved his hand for 
me to subside. I felt the heat jump within. I 
asked him again. There was a bag full of 
peanuts on the table beside him and he held a 
large bunch of Malaga grapes in his left hand. 
He was tranced in the delight of the two — a 
mouthful of peanuts, then a burst of grape, 
eaten together. He had a fat and greedy face; 
the look of one who has been very fat as a boy. 
He had probably looked forward to this hour for 
a long time. We sick men did not mar his sense 
of solitude. The big green grapes — they were 
like the water-falls. Almost it seemed they 
would quench me. I got my brain and words 
working together again — to speak to him. 

He went on feeding himself. 

I hated him as I never hated before nor since. 
It is almost self-murder to hate as at that mo- 

[111] 



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ment. I felt in the blanket roll for my six- 
shooter. It was not with my things, but there was 
a lustful vision for a moment as my fingers groped. 
It would have been delectable to shoot him — to 
knock him down with the first ball, to watch > 
his eyes as I emptied the cylinder. I would have 
done it as certainly as we were there together — 
the rest of the sick men, unconscious. I raised 
myself to my hips before him and cursed him 
full-length — as only a cavalryman with imagina- 
tion can curse a fellow-man. An officer came in 
before I finished. They gave me drink; I sank 
back into the red burning. 

At last, the train. It must have been the early 
forenoon, since I was clearly conscious. A string 
of day-coaches, seats knocked out, three tiers of 
bunks on either side. The car was full, when I 
was helped in, but a body was carried for- 
ward. . . . They were crying for water, for 
help, for home. ... It seemed to me that I was 
not sick — that these were sick men. 

It was just this way. Perhaps it saved my 
life, the sense that came to me, that I should 
never be like these men — raving, their bodies un- 
washed and beyond control — the worse than 
death in the air — the silence in the bunks, July 
heat of Florida, the following flies, blankets fall- 
ing down asmear — the hurrying of cans and their 
passing back — hands out for water — the absence 

[112] 



SOLDIER 



of all help, when the orderly was in another 
coach. 

It was mysterious. Something said to me: 
"Quit thinking about yourself. You're all right 
Look at these. Look at these, and sit tight. 
Keep a stiff bridle-arm." 

I was but one bunk — -this was a coach of thirty 
bunks, in a train, long as a grain freight, and as 
slow. For a month such trains had gone 
north. . . . Five hundred miles to Atlanta, 
forty hours, but they were mostly lapses to me. 
The orderly who took care of what he could, was 
earning twenty dollars the month. He helped to 
carry the dead forward. God pity them, and 
him, and Washington, and the greedy political 
men who bulled it all. ... I wouldn't have 
stopped to write these things with so much to 
tell, save that every little while this country of 
mine talks of making an example of some fight- 
ing nation. 



[113] 



ATLANTA 



THE film of that journey is elided again 
and again. My body was distressed 
with foul woollen clothing and 
ached from the unclean rack in which 
it lay so long; all senses were poisoned . . . but 
I awoke to certain heaven. 

A tent and heavenly coolness, wooden floor, 
sight of low hills under the reefed walls, water 
in glass, cots with sheets and pillows, an orderly 
undressing me, and gracious God — a woman, 
washing my face and neck with a cool soapy 
cloth. She had all the loveliness of this heaven, 
and I had not seen a white woman in so long. 
She helped them bathe me swiftly, perfectly, 
washed my mouth with a clean-tasting solution. 
The touch of clean cloth to my flesh was ex- 
quisite, full-length. She brought a clinking jar. 
She was beautiful, and moved about her work 
with the faintest dawn of a smile. 
"Open your mouth," she said. 

[114] 



ATLANTA 



I wanted to ask her something, but had to 
obey. 

She dropped a bit of ice upon my tongue from 
the clinking jar, with a silver spoon that did not 
touch my lips. I felt the pillow, the cool air 
blowing under the canvas; I studied the woman 
and the low hills. Always when she came near, 
there was some business with my mouth — drink, 
temperature-taking, or something like — so that I 
could not ask her. Long afterward, she paused 
a moment by her table, pencil to her lips. I 
managed to beckon. She came with the same 
faint smile. 

"Are you going to be here?" 

"Oh, yes. ... I am relieved at night, but I 
come back." 

"You'll come back?" 

"Oh, yes." 

I fell asleep, luxurious, happy. There was 
something more to the incident than is apparent — 
a danger in it, for I loosed the bridle arm. . . . 
The crisis came, and I was out of the fight. I 
had put it all to her that moment; I gave up be- 
cause she was there. I think in the midst of the 
deeper energies of her life, where the superb ac- 
tions are prompted, she knew. She was there 
to the end. There were many soldiers like me, 
and the love of them sustains her now, for this 
sort of love is slow to die. 

I saw all the dawns. Fever rose with the day, 
[H5] 



MIDSTREAM 



and the rest was marked out, until the cool wind 
and the grey east roused me again. There was 
no pain. I had that world-old shock of the sick 
man, suddenly discovering his hand. The brown 
was nearly gone, and flesh with it. 

One morning, the major-surgeon of the post 
came through with a young doctor. The two 
paused at different cots, the major pointing out 
the different phases of typhoid and malaria. 
They stood before me: 

"Here's an example of the typhoid subsiding, 
and the malaria hanging on," the major said. 
"We can cope with the latter — a recovery past 
doubt." 

He was beyond considering even the conscious- 
ness of an enlisted man. His affront was alto- 
gether unstudied. The news was good, though 
I had been unaware of the closeness of the 
call. . . . My cot companion to the left was not 
aroused. I heard the verdict, and didn't believe 
it. But they were right. He did not rally. 

The hunger began; the word "furlough" was 
in the air. I asked her at last. "As soon as you 
are strong enough to travel," she said. "You 
are to have a month at home." 

It seemed almost impossibly good, but I built 
to it, and hastened my recovery on the reports. 
I would hold the temperature bulb between my 
teeth, inhaling the cool air upon it, and exhaling 
the warm through my nostrils. Once I brought 

[116] 



ATLANTA 



them to me with swift concern. I had tricked 
too well, the bulb showing somewhat below nor- 
mal. One night in harrowing hunger, I leaned 
forth from my cot, appropriated several crackers 
from a box on the table, and drank some stout 
that was there. Afterward, I lay thralled be- 
tween the effects of the nourishment, and the fear 
that the fever would come again; yet somehow, 
the responsibility for this action did not strike 
me as exactly my own. The orderly had left 
the stuff within reach. . . . She put me on my 
mettle, as I left. It would be my fault if re- 
lapse came, she said. I must fight hunger for 
days yet — take as little as I could, as rarely as 
I could. 

"If you don't, you'll spoil it all." 

I bade her good-bye, departed — then went 
back to the tent to look at her once more. 

"It's bad luck to say good-bye twice," she said 
with her faint smile. (I saw her a year after- 
ward in the big division-hospital in Manila. She 
remembered, but was very busy with other sick 
men. We could not talk, but a moment. 
The cots called to her; her eyes frequently turn- 
ing back to the cots — that God-loved woman.) 
And now I had to stiffen the bridle-arm again. 
It seemed important that I live; yet hunger was 
a devil. I understood the foxes and the wild 
things. Long days in the train northward, and 
people were amazingly kind to a soldier. They 

[H7] 



MIDSTREAM 



brought in food and fruits. It was all in my 
hands to live or die. I wonder if other men are 
at their best so — alone. Always it has come to 
me — a fresh reservoir of strength, with the con- 
sciousness of the last resort. 

My mother had waited at the station for 
days. . . . The car was deep in the yard; I 
could not walk swiftly — another maimed home- 
coming. She was about to leave when the gate- 
man said that another soldier was in the distance. 
I saw her face straining toward me. I won- 
dered that her face did not soften; she seemed 
to be looking directly at me. I was close to 
her, as one in the same room — I spoke, before 
she accepted me. She could not form words. 

I was so much better than I had been, and so 
glad to be there, that I forgot how I must look 
to her — less than ninety pounds present. ... It 
was a happy time for us — back in the old house in 
lower Lincoln; my grandmother still at her seat 
in the dining-room. I was made over new — all 
new clean flesh — clean-minded, tractable, with- 
out nerves, very easily appealed to. I put back 
seventy pounds in the next sixty days and learned 
to smoke again. I might have entered a new 
life just there, but I was not ready. 

The day before leaving to rejoin the troop in 
Huntsville, Alabama, was Sunday, and the after- 
noon was spent at the house of the boy I had 
avoided in high-school days, because of his readi- 

[118] 



ATLANTA 



ness to pay car-fare. It was the same house of 
happiness, except that she, who had taken the 
young professor was home again, and in black. 
The time passed magically. At supper I told 
something of the flies by day and the blood- 
suckers of the Tampan nights. One always 
knows when some one is listening with a full 
heart. Her eyes were a-shine with tears. . . . 
I had to go early, being promised with my 
mother to church that last night. . . . The 
younger sister kissed me good-bye and the 
mother; indeed, the parting with the father and 
brother was like a bestowal of rare presents. In 
the midst of it all I was looking into the eyes of 
Penelope — and she kissed the soldier. Three 
months afterward, 'way up in the inside hills of 
Porto Rico, locked tight in a Spanish prison used 
for cavalry guard-house, I was writing to her — 
brother. 

I had proved a bad soldier. Joining the troop 
in Huntsville, Alabama, a finish had been put 
upon the perfection of my health by a series of 
long rides in sharp November weather among 
the red rock hills of that good country. We en- 
trained for Savannah and were presently at sea — 
six hundred horses, as many enlisted men, 
officers, ship quota, and not a woman — in the old 
transport Michigan. Four or five days out in 
the still, flashing Caribbean, at mid-day, we 
struck a spine of the Silver Reef of San Do- 

[119] 



MIDSTREAM 



mingo, being thirty or forty miles off our course. 
There is a shiver in that reminder of Washing- 
ton and politics. 

I had just passed from the galley to the ham- 
mock-hold with a mess-tin full of "slum," when 
the ship heaved and the keel grated. Every- 
thing was still on deck; men seemed to hesitate 
before speaking. . . . We struck again. . . . 
Yellow patches of the coral spires, rose to the 
top-water in all directions. Looking down I saw 
the quick glide of a fish across the shadowy reef 
which we had just grazed; and at a distance, a 
shark's fin knifing the glazy surface. Men 
moved with queer stealth down into the hold 
and armed themselves. There was no woman. 
These landsmen would fight for the boats; the 
officer-and-man business would break once and 
for all out here at sea. Groups gathered and 
augmented about the boats: one man steadily 
whetted his knife on his canvas legging; another 
was reading intently from a paper-covered book. 

The ship was moving as one through an un- 
familiar dark room. There was no leak; the day 
was at its height, and the sea was calm. A sailor 
aloft to the very tip of the foremast marked out 
the passage through the yellow patches. I do 
not recall a single military order being given in 
those two hours. For many moments the hope 
would rise; and then the coral would draw along 
the submerged plates like a low appraising hand. 

[120] 



ATLANTA 



At four we had been clear some time, but not 
until night-fall did the ship put on any speed. 
It was a worth-while afternoon ; certain mysteries 
and pictures from it unfolded afterward. 

The hold of the horses was a hell. They had 
been vilely shipped; stood knee-deep now in the 
simmering manure ; the hoisting gear creaked con- 
tinually, lifting out the fallen and dropping them 
into the sea. They were watched by a running 
guard of quick reliefs, for men could not long 
endure the heat and that air, blinding with 
ammonia. The sight of the hideously swollen 
legs of the horses was crippling to me. . . . 
We touched Ponce, and sailed around to Maya- 
guez, where we unshipped in the torrid light and 
rode the poor beasts into the sea. ... I remem- 
ber the native girls coming down to the shore in 
the early evening, and calling "adios" to us as 
they passed. I tasted rum that night — ron 
bianco washed with the milk of cocoa-nuts. 



I 121 ] 



15 
MANATI 



A TROPICAL Island appeals to me as 
Paris to many men ; and such a fairy 
isle is this — of miniature mountain 
ranges, deep-shaded and deep-run- 
ning gorges, towering white cliffs, laughing 
brown maidens, valleys hushed, vernal, scented 
with fruit, oranges growing wild and free as 
water, the stride of torrential showers from hill 
to hill, sunlight afterward laughing everywhere — 
men only to break the dream. I can see the 
natives goading the ox-spans with the long 
steel-shod poles, and troopers lording it over the 
native, on the matter of colour. Poor fellows, 
they had little chance for inflation. They but 
reflected the system that had brutalised them. 
Wherever the under-white of a caste-arrangement 
is turned loose, there you will find a lordly 
beater of the black. 

I was left in Manati with a detachment of 
ten men, while the main body of the troop went 
on to make headquarters in Ciales, eight miles 

[ 122] 



M A N A T I 



higher in the hills. Howard, the sergeant 
in charge, made me cook of the little outfit, and 
the men remarked flavour and finish. My 
mother had taught me. I crisped the bacon, 
browned the beans, and carried out ideas of 
coffee-making that I had long known to be su- 
perior to those used in the troop. Then we had 
fruits and vegetables; it was only a matter of 
garlic, cold boiled potatoes, an armful of green 
leaves and three or four cans of salmon to make 
a mountain salad. 

Meanwhile the quantity of colourful letters 
sent to my newspaper, including the story of 
striking the reef off Santo Domingo, had begun 
to tell in a small way in Detroit. Money came 
to me. 

Now, for two cents in Manati, you could buy 
an inch or two of ron bianco in the bottom of 
your quart-cup; a handful of brown sugar may 
be had in any door-way of that tall-cane coun- 
try; juice of orange pressed upon the sugar and 
rum, makes a man forget how swiftly he is ad- 
mitting the devil. I didn't miss any meals, but 
the pueblo charmed me between times and after- 
hours. It would have been all right, except for 
Sergeant Howard who wasn't drinking, and he 
was a mean man "up the pole." One evening 
as the kitchen police gathered up the pots and 
pans, Howard informed me that there was to 
be a running-guard to watch the stores; that my 

[ 123] 



MIDSTREAM 



trick was between eleven and twelve. I sug- 
gested that it was usual for the cook to be ex- 
empted from guard-duty. He repeated his or- 
ders. At eleven that night I was in the pueblo, 
speaking Spanish as I have never been able to 
do since. There was a little toy of a native 
maiden who put an enchantment upon the teach- 
ing. (I hadn't seen her face except in faintest 
starlight.) 

A corporal and two others came for me. I 
bade them bide and listen, offering rum, oranges 
and the sugar basket. They tarried until 
Howard came himself. 

I assured the sergeant that there would be no 
hitch in the preparation of breakfast, suggesting 
that he couldn't have been serious in asking a 
cook to do guard-duty. No humour lived in that 
man. He ordered me to camp. I refused. He 
bade the corporal and pair take me, and the 
fight was on. On her door-step, too. 

It must have been strange to one not under- 
standing our parley — to see four men suddenly 
leap at each other. Sergeant Howard, however, 
made sure of his order being carried out, by 
dropping the butt-end of his six-shooter upon 
my crown. I awoke in the Spanish prison at 
Manati in a stone cell with thick mahogany bars, 
opening into a court, which I describe from an 
old story: 

". . . The small stone-paved plaza was sur- 

[ 124] 



M A N A T I 



rounded by cells like mine, dark and dirty and 
depressing. There was a well in the centre of 
this prison-yard, and when one walked across the 
flagging, his footsteps sounded with cavernous 
reverberations through the black water-chamber 
below. The entrance to the plaza was a big iron 
gate, opened in the day time and guarded by the 
native policemen. At sunset the prisoners were 
locked in the cells and the plaza was left un- 
tenanted, save by stray ponies and pallid moon- 
bars." 

The native officer unlocked my cell in the early 
morning and allowed me the freedom of the 
plaza. There was money in my pockets. Half- 
jokingly, I sent out for a cup of wine. The fact 
that it was brought altered my future. Howard 
appeared later. Everything would be forgotten, 
said he, if I would go back and stay in camp. 
I had drunk the wine; the night before was re- 
kindled. There was shade here, and many 
strange studies. I had money; I could write; 
the Porto Rican policemen were promising. I 
told Howard I'd do the cooking; but wouldn't 
do guard and wouldn't stay in camp between 
times. He went away. Rations were brought 
from the troop; my canteen and other matters. 
I sent the canteen out for vinto Unto and it came 
back full. I now had paper, pencils and much 
work to do; under the eaves of the cells. 

"A woman walked slowly through the iron 

[125] 



MIDSTREAM 



gate at the prison entrance. She was smileless, 
hungry-eyed and silent. A large tin-can was 
balanced upon her head. Her fleshless figure was 
marked with none of the curves of a woman. 
Her feet were bare; her movements slow and 
painful. Slowly and painfully at the well, she 
filled her jar. The descending chain made a 
weird cavernous rumble as it whipped against the 
slimy stone-wall of the vault. Kneeling upon 
the flaggings, she placed the can upon her head 
and was gone." 

It was like taking photographs — to do these 
paragraphs. Twelve or fifteen times each day 
the water-carrier came. It made me feel bet- 
ter to work. I always lost the cramp of ex- 
ternals, when work was coming well. . . . Then 
there was Tad. . . . "Tad had the eyes of the 
woman who sat at the door of the last cell to 
the right where the stocks stood. His arms were 
like any other baby boy's, but if there ever was 
a voice in his throat, it was not used while I was 
there. His head held some kind of a brain; you 
could tell that by his eyes, but Tad never learned 
to smile. He studied me from head to foot, 
when I first became his fellow-convict. A gar- 
ment hung about him, and about the garment 
hung the same odour that raped my nostrils when 
I ventured too close to the woman sitting at the 
entrance to the last cell — half-hidden behind her 
gaunt knees. Her lips, her breastless figure 

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never moved, but everywhere her eyes followed 
the baby. Ti^ were filled, as if with the crime 
of his life; they were bright with the staring 
brightness of fever. Had they shone from a 
skull wrapped in brown paper, they could not 
have made you shudder more." 

I find in this old story, too, my terrors of the 
night after my cell was locked: 

"Did you ever hear a cat step on dry brittle 
leaves? It is just such a sound as this that a 
multitude of cockroaches make, dragging their 
heavy abdomens across a stone floor. It will 
keep you awake. You will sit erect, and things 
will become distorted in your mind, eyelids 
stretched wide apart, darkness shadowy and 
moving. The shrill snarling 'peak, peak' of 
ravenous rats can be borne, but the clicking rattle 
of the cockroach hordes is maddening. If you 
shut your eyes, spiders will dangle before you. 
A stronge pipe will soothe some." 

And finally : 

"The fleshless form of the water-woman swung 
slowly through the iron gate. She filled her jar, 
knelt and was gone. . . . The sight and pres- 
ence of Tad sickened me. I placed a tin plate 
of bacon and potatoes upon the flagging and 
shoved it to him. He took a potato in his two 
hands; it was slowly absorbed like a process of 
unction. . . , He was hourly decreasing the in- 
terval between us, so I had to wash him. I cut 

[127] 



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down an army under-shirt into a sort of ulster 
for him. He watched me soberly. I rolled up 
my sleeves, put an extra charge into my pipe and 
recklessly cut off Tad's garment, so crowded with 
associations I had recently helped to per- 
form the last rites over the body of a government 
mule, four days gone from the glanders. Pic- 
tures of that task rushed through my mind 
now. ... I ascertained why Tad's slate-covered 
hair grew in patches. With a half-box of 
matches I succeeded in reducing his former gar- 
ment to ashes — then turned again to the bare 
babe. 

C T can hardly express the shock. With 
averted face I beckoned to one of the convict 
women, and gave directions at a modest dis- 
tance. Tad was allowed to dry in the sun. She 
was shiny and rose-touched through the brown, 
after the scrubbing with government bouquet." 

The second or third day I noted a little na- 
tive maiden at the iron gate, smiling and wav- 
ing at me. When she spoke, I knew it was she, 
who had made Spanish so easy. I gave her some- 
thing to get a new dress. They no longer 
locked me in the cell at night; but the troop did 
not know. Finally after "taps" sounded, the 
native policemen permitted me to wander forth 
for a little while in the nights. I was careful 
not to get them into trouble, and grateful, too. 

I cannot reckon how long I was there, not 

[128] 



M A N A T I 



more than four weeks. From a Kentucky volun- 
teer outfit, a certain Bill McKinley came to the 
lock. He had rum-madness, but that was a man. 
We talked by the well-curbing through the 
nights. He told me one night of a Kentucky 
girl, and I fell to thinking of that last afternoon 
at home, of the sad eyes that had listened. I 
wrote to her brother when the morning came. 

Now, I heard from the soldier who brought 
my food, that Howard grouched hours over my 
case, that trouble was ahead. I wrote to O. C, 
then a Washington correspondent, to get me out 
of the service if he could. Howard was finally 
relieved by the troop from Manati service, and 
detached a pair of sentries to conduct me. I was 
not allowed my mount, but given a mule for the 
ride to Ciales. There are eleven fords in that 
eight miles; a sentry with drawn carbine rode on 
either side. A rather effective entrance, as 
prisoner, was made at headquarters. 

. . . Prison again, and no plaza, a place of 
smallpox, vermin and darkness; no joke about 
this, and hate filled me. . . . The private who 
brought food reported that a native woman had 
come up the trail wet from the fords, and had 
been watching in front for two days. Nine or 
ten feet up the wall was the one opening, the 
single source of light, six inches square. After 
the private left, I up-turned the cot, climbed 
upon it to look out. The little teacher again. 

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I tossed her a present, bade her go home — that I 
would come. She set me thinking. The dark 
solitude was a vicious pressure. . . . 

Into this darkness came a letter from Detroit 
written by the managing editor of the rival after- 
noon paper. He inquired if I would care to shake 
the service and go to work for him. The fury of 
my hope was hard to endure ; and there was much 
for me, in this neat proof that my work was be- 
ing read at home. I wrote back, and kept the 
secret. So another effort was added to O. C.'s, 
for my discharge. 

They began to use me at this time to dig the 
sinks for the troop; heavy work, because the top- 
soil was solid root-tangle. One day, a lament- 
able recruit, assigned as my guard, made me 
desperate. He wanted to desert, but was afraid ; 
tried to persuade me to go with him; sat, car- 
bine across his knees, upon the dirt which I 
tossed out, and whined the hours away. My 
wrist was becoming interestingly lame. It oc- 
curred to me to end this business. I whacked 
the heavy pick around the sides of the hole, with 
the lame hand, while the sentry was staring away 
through the hills toward the sea. A painful 
swelling arose at once. I was escorted to the 
troop; the doctor ordered me to quarters there. 
This was clear gain, for I had expected the black 
hole again. 

At this time the troop was at its worst. We 

[130] 



M A N A T I 



were quartered in an old banana-house; life was 
lazy and warm. The longer in the service the 
more the soldier sleeps ; naps in the morning, naps 
in the afternoon ; early to bed, and the look of be- 
ing led to slaughter, when reveille sounds in 
the morning. These processes of deterioration 
are so much more subtle and demoralising than 
prodigal expenditure of life-force; this slow-go- 
ing is a pace that kills. I was shocked to find 
that the troop, as a whole, regarded me as de- 
praved. I yearned to be with Bill McKinley, a 
real human ; I lay plotting and full of hate ; dared 
not let my thoughts actually reach the possibility 
of discharge — but this unformed hope was the 
sustainer of life. 

Daily I had looked for the announcement of 
my court-martial. I had resisted arrest, proved 
insubordinate, had not appeared for guard duty — 
these were the surface of the charges against me. 
Still I was held without action. Captain B. 
had fallen into the rum, and could not get up. 
For weeks he had lain, an orderly serving drinks 
until he slept, in a native house in Ciales, remote 
from the quartered-troop. Certain papers were 
necessary to accompany me to San Juan for court- 
martial; the old man had not the faculties to 
gather these together. 

Neither did they send me to the black hole, 
when my wrist healed. Keiber, the new top-ser- 
geant, showed an inclination to let me work back 

[131] 



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into the troop. I see now that the charges pend- 
ing would have been dropped, had my conduct 
been pure white on that informal parole. The 
kitchen policing was given me. Ten days 
elapsed, and I was very full of strength. 

Work was done for the day; I fell to think- 
ing of Manati. There was left two hours of 
daylight, and no call to answer until reveille. All 
troop forms were hurried through so the men 
could get back to bed. Miles away through a 
rift in the mountains, I could see the Caribbean. 
The sun was sinking into the sea. The eastern 
ridges were beginning to be shadowy. I spoke 
to another soldier of Manati. We went down 
the trail to the first ford, and he backed out. I 
asked him to toss a penny to see if I should go 
alone. The decision was against the adven- 
ture. 

"Toss it again," said I. 

It was my way, and I left him. Sixteen 
mountain miles, twenty-two fords, and I must 
be back in my bunk at dawn. Government 
mules had been carried away lifeless, because they 
struck the rivers at the wrong place. These 
mules are not without a number of kicks. . . . 
I made the first four fords in the twilight; the 
moon came up. The fifth and sixth crossings on 
the way were the bad ones — the sixth and seventh 
coming back. The fight that these two gave me, 
made me wonder what I should do without moon- 

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M A N A T I 



light. . . . They laughed in Manati, at the wet 
man drinking rum and anise. The little native 
girl laughed. 

Toward midnight, there was a rain-shower 
and the moon was lost. I started back, mag- 
netised to headquarters by the fear of failing to 
reach my bunk for first-call. A pair of Porto 
Rican shoes had begun to grind early on the jour- 
ney. . « . Breast-deep in the fifth ford I 
felt weakness for the first time. Rain-drops 
splashed against my face as I strained against 
the pressure of the current. The moon had 
glowed for a moment in the midst of black mov- 
ing streaks of cloud, but had not come forth. 
The next crossing was the ugly one. The trail 
down to the water's edge was slippery from the 
rain. Blackness was unbroken now. I could not 
see where the cliffs ended and the sky began, nor 
half-way across the angry river, but I could hear 
its rapid monotone, and see the foam. 

My strength seemed uncertain. Every time I 
raised my foot, it was harder to get it back, be- 
fore toppling. A rolling stone, and the current 
whirled me. Ten minutes of pure battle before 
I touched the opposite bank; nor could I tell how 
far I had been carried down in making the swim. 
All was black above, as I lay panting on the 
stones. In the mile to the seventh ford, I must 
have wandered from the trail, for I had hardly 
entered, before deep water closed in. The fight 

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was on again. I battled in the crossing until 
there was red before my eyes and my lungs 
seemed full of blood. The thing that made the 
battle so dreadful, was the thought that I would 
be no good if I did reach shore; that I was 
broken and a-leak inside. Yet commanding all, 
(and I met this fellow again in another narrow 
escape from drowning,) was a beyond- will, a 
beyond-vitality, that the body obeyed automat- 
ically, after man-force was exhausted. 

When I recovered consciousness on the bank, 
I could not find the trail. All was strange. I 
crawled along the river edges feeling the stones — 
for those ground smooth by the tires of the 
wagon-trains. I must have groped for an hour, 
back and forth; and at last determined to go in 
one direction until something happened. This 
determination brought me finally to a wire fence. 
A dog barked. 

The whole trail between the towns was a wild 
glory in sunlight; I did not recall fence or house, 
but now a wooden shutter slid open. In the can- 
dle-light a fat Spaniard stood, holding a musket. 
We parleyed; I was asked to enter. He was 
frightened at first, but his woman raked up the 
coals of the fire and made coffee. I asked to be 
shown the trail to Ciales. The Spaniard waved 
his hand before my eyes, took my wet clothes, 
and gave me a dry suit with girth to enclose a 

[134] 



M A N A T I 



troop horse. I asked for the trail to Ciales, but 
he brought me coffee, rich in flavour as it was 
mighty in body; swung a hammock by the fire, 
and bent me to it in his huge arms. Then he lit 
a cigar at the candle, smoked it into brisk burn- 
ing, silenced further petitions, by placing it in 
my mouth. ... I thought I made him under- 
stand that I must only rest an hour, that I 
would be hung and shot and quartered — if I did 
not reach Ciales before reveille. I awoke with 
the dawn coming in, the cigar in its first ash, be- 
tween my fingers. . . . My body felt beaten, my 
feet swollen and feverish, so I had to crush them 
into the native shoes. He would not let me go, 
until I drank more coffee. From the window he 
pointed toward the sun, and beyond his palm- 
groves, rose my trail. 

I thought of the troop, the squalor of it. I 
tried to make the Spaniard see, (though I was 
going to hell for it,) how much I thanked him and 
loved his kindness. ... I had missed the trail 
the night before by a quarter of a mile. A half 
hour of running and Ciales stood out upon its 
cliffs a mile away. Yellow and rose were in the 
flood of morning. Over the rocks and hills was 
borne the first call a soldier hears : 

"I can't get 'em up, 
I can't get 'em up, 

I can't get 'em up in the mo-rn-ning " 

[135] 



MIDSTREAM 



The troop was formed for reveille^ when I 
slipped into ranks. Keiber saw it all, led me to 
Captain B , who still lay sprawled and in- 
flamed, wearing a grey beard I had not seen be- 
fore. The stuff that he said to me was like him — 
words, grunted and snarled; words, pig-like and 
nasty. . . . The black hole again. I slept from 
five in the morning until darkness — slept in that 
place of vermin and la vireula. ... A soldier 
stole in to see me late in the night — a "bob-tail," 
a bad man who shot a native afterward, and who 
is either dead or in military prison now. This 
ruffian, so rhythmically evil that one was not 
safe with him, had forced his way past the native 
policia and brought me rum and cakes, while the 
tired troop slept. 



[136] 



i6 
UNION SQUARE 



KEIBER finally sent for me. I did not 
dare to ask, nor think. I searched his 
face; he searched mine. We passed 
through the bunk-house. Grooming 
was over; many of the soldiers were back 
to bed. Keiber walked before me to the troop- 
clerk. Papers were there on the field-box that 
concerned me. The two men spoke of San 
Juan. ... If it meant court-martial, and I were 
convicted — -there could be no two ways to that — 
any order for my discharge would be invalid. 

Keiber took the papers, and led me to the Cap- 
tain's quarters. The old man had turned white — 
the red pig gone from him. Old and pitiable 
and trembly he was, trying to climb out of the 
rum. I thought of him, of the reputation he 

had won long ago, "B , the best pistol shot 

in the army. 55 What a sound that had, when 
I first joined the troop. He glanced at me, bared 
his yellow teeth, breathed on a dry palate. . . . 
Were these the papers that would send me to 

[137] 



MIDSTREAM 



San Juan for court-martial? Would he be 
strong enough to sign them? A table was 
brought to his cot. The orderly raised him. 
The Captain's hand was stubby, short-fingered, 
very shaky. The pen was inked for him. He 
wrote one short word, then his name, then called 
for a drink. I read the result upside down stand- 
ing there. It was large and slanted downward 
on the sheet: 

B 
A 
D 

Such was my army character; inscribed by my 
Captain. On the back of the document was 
written, according to regulations since I had not 
been tried: 

Discharge : Honourable 
Service: Honest and Faithful 
Court-martials : None 

Such was my discharge — a lie on both sides, 
ludicrous and contemptible as every last one of 
the army systems. 

I swallowed. I had suddenly become afraid 
for my life. I said, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," 
to Sergeant Keiber and the troop-clerk, with a 
respect that they had never won from me before. 
I gathered up my duffle without words. It 
seemed that I was in danger of death, before I 

[138] 



UNION SQUARE 



could get away from the troop; that something 
would happen to make me remain; that I would 
be locked up again; that something would be 
told about me that would break the authority of 
the papers; that I was insane and these were 
court-martial papers and not my discharge or- 
der. . . , O , the old top-sergeant watched 

me, smoking his pipe. Howard was there tak- 
ing his ease. I gave the former the opportunity 
to refuse to shake hands with me, but did not 
press further. I passed out — not big enough to 
pity them — hating them, as they stood and stared, 
or stared at me from their bunks — all in a black 
grouch because I was free. I had suddenly risen 
above them all — from the lowest place to the 
highest— from the last to the first. I seemed to 

see poor old B — as from an eagle's height, and 

all the army, and the Island. ... I moved 
down the trail in the morning, ran a little, ex- 
pecting a shout, even a shot in the back — ran down 
to the first ford. 

An ox-team was making the crossing. The 
pair seemed hardly to move in the butting cur- 
rent. I learned from them that one must move 
slowly in a swift ford — to go slow that was my 
agony, with Ciales still in view, sitting upon her 
white cliff. I walked ahead in the passage be- 
tween the rivers, but waited for the oxen at the 
ford; looked at my papers again, and at the wild 
glory of the Island. There was an order for 

[139] 



MIDSTREAM 



ninety-seven dollars — finals and savings on 
clothing — to be cashed in San Juan. I had not 
noticed this before. 

In Manati they told me that the little native 
teacher had gone on to San Juan; but Bill Mc- 
Kinley was there. With great effort, he bor- 
rowed a dollar from his Captain, to pay my train- 
fare to San Juan ... a first-magnitude man, 
not taking a drink that day. He helped me to 
the train. 

That night in El Capitol, I found Marie of 
Manati. I was beginning to dare to believe. 
My day of happiness rose in that night to incom- 
parable zenith. Next daj^ they gave me the 
money and passage to New York on the trans- 
port Berlin, not yet in the harbour. 

I would ramble with Marie, sometimes in the 
night, sometimes in the day. Five days and 
nights of strange dream, and with every deeper 
touch of consciousness, I met the exultation of 
freedom. Once Marie tried to rob me. The 
people she lived with had forced her to it; she 
was just the same afterward. ... I would sit 
under a certain awning at the water-front, drink- 
ing wine and lemon, to cool my throat after ad- 
ventures in the city. Marie left me down there 
the last morning, before the city was awake — 
went up the street crying like a little child. I 
remember sitting on a big brass cannon there, 
as the day came up. . . . Marie came back a last 

[ 140] 



UNION SQUARE 



time. She wanted to go on the ship with 
me. . . . 

Blue Peter was flying, but we did not sail un- 
til afternoon. I remember sleeping somewhere, 
waking up with a start to find the ship still 
there . . . buying a hamper of bottles, and hir- 
ing a boat to take me out into the harbour. . . . 
They gave me a hammock. I recall the heat, 
the daylight burning at the ports — the white sea- 
wall of San Juan, a last time. I awoke in the 
cool night, found a drink or two in my ham- 
mock — the rest was gone. I staggered up on the 
deck in the purity, stood there breathing; and it 
seemed living God was in that starry night. 
Five days in El Capitol, and I had not sent Bill 
McKinley his dollar. He died down there. 

I was about broken physically. The ship- 
surgeon told me a minor operation was neces- 
sary; that he would perform it after we left 
Santiago. The day we lay in that sharky Cuban 
harbour, was the hottest I have ever seen in this 
world. Decks blistered. The town and the hills 
behind where the fighting was, the yellow-fever 
quarantine sprawled to the left, and the winding 
passage to Moro— were all strange and dreary 
through films of heat. I watched the sharks 
feeding in the harbour. 

The anchor lifted; the surgeon sent for me. 
No ansesthetic was wasted on my account, and 
there was a two-inch incision. The pain sur- 

[141] 



MIDSTREAM 



prised me; it was incredible. They carried me 
to a hammock, saying I would heal as soon as we 
reached the coolness. It was exactly so. We 
struck a gale off Hatteras, a winter gale, mag- 
nificence in it for me. It is associated with my 
twenty-first birthday and I was able to walk. 

Just seven dollars left. The fare was thirteen 
dollars from New York to Detroit. I staked a 
five dollar goldpiece twice at a chuck-a-luck game 
in the hold of the Berlin^ and won both times. 

We reached New York in an evening of bitter 
cold. Four or five of us from the ship were still 
together. The soldier habit makes a man shrink 
from being alone. An old cavalry horse often 
dies shortly after being condemned from the 
picket line. 

The fact that the promotion of individuality 
is the aim of creation; that a man can only rise 
from the herd by getting alone; that a man any 
good anywhere is at his best alone ; — these things 
are but additional human violations of the army 
system. A system fundamentally evil, is bad 
full length, bad in all its ramifications. . . . We 
drank a bit, where the beer-glasses were large. 
Our aim was Bleecker Street, one of the Mills 
hotels. All war-zeal had long since been drained 
out of the city; we were held in as much regard, 
as any uniformed gang deserves. 

High upon a building, in the night-light, as we 
[ 142] 



UNION SQUARE 



crossed Union Square, I saw the sign of an old 
and worthy magazine in large gilt letters, ... I 
had cut pictures out of old copies of that maga- 
zine at the dining-room table, before kilts were 
discarded; and pasted the pictures of authors, 
cut from its advertising pages, in a book. I had 
looked to that magazine for all that was high 
and finished in literary value; the names of 
writers appearing there even once, were as far 
from me in greatness, as I had been beneath the 
generals of the army, according to the military 
plan. No aspiration of mine had ever yet 
reached that market; indeed, my voice would 
have broken had I ventured to ask the editorial- 
floor from the elevator man. ... I looked in 
the entrance as we passed. I had no business 
there; and yet in the womb of work — far from 
virgin even then— a child had leaped at that sign. 
It was still standing a few weeks ago. From 
a luncheon table in an upper room in Sixteenth 
Street, I saw it again. That winter night came 
back, and our asking the way to Bleecker 
Street. ... It was something the same when I 
first entered the newspaper office in Detroit, 
heard the presses throbbing below, and smelled 
the inimitable atmosphere. These are rare gen- 
erative moments — in spite of the pitifulness of 
them — when a boy first beholds his arena, decked 
in the panoply of illusion. ... I have entered 

[ 143] 



MIDSTREAM 



that door in Union Square since, passed through 
the hall; I have told my business to the office- 
boy of an upper floor — even in the office of the 
editor. 



[ 144] 



PENELOPE 



IT was dear O. C. who had extracted me 
from the service. The managing-editor of 
the rival paper in Detroit gave me a posi- 
tion at once. I lasted six weeks, doing 
short stories, together with the usual reportorial 
work, This managing-editor was not of my 
sort; I have often marvelled at the extraordinary 
impulse he must have followed in writing the 
letter that gave me such joy in Porto Rico. It 
was unlike all the rest of him that I came to 
know. He gave me the Police Court, not for 
news-bulletins as in Cincinnati, but for feature 
stories. 

The sixth week, an old friend was gathered 
into court. Abroad, the night before, zero 
weather, wrapped in a horse-blanket, he had 
talked a different language from the policeman 
who made the arrest. I knew the man's history. 
He was one of the products of the municipal de- 
pression which encircled lower Lincoln. I 

[145] 



MIDSTREAM 



wrote around him that morning "The Downfall of 
a Good Fellow." Personally he was very proud 
of it afterward, and showed it about the bars. 
Not so, the managing-editor. 

I came into the office in the afternoon. Just 
as I opened a fresh paper, and was glancing 
through the story and the illustrations, the city- 
editor called me: 

"For God's sake, get your money and get out 
of here. I suppose, I'm a goner, too — " 

"What's the matter?" 

"Why, the old man won't dare to go home. 
This 'Downfall' chap of yours, is his brother-in- 
law—" 

I was too crushed to remark that I had merely 
written the story; that it wasn't my business if 
it got in ; that a man should watch his own paper 
when his relatives get into Police Court. ... I 
have never been able to understand. The man- 
aging-editor never forgave me. Ten years after- 
ward, my first novel appeared. He was still on 
the paper, and no review of the story could run 
until he retired, eight months later. 

Spring was breaking again — that spring of '99. 
Since the death of my father, we had gone back 
to live at the old house in lower Lincoln. I sunk 
into the wonderful country of story production. 
This alone mitigated the misfortune at the news- 
paper. The city-editor had said to me, "A man 
who can write your kind of stories, doesn't need 

[ 146] 






PENELOPE 



a newspaper job." ... I had my pipe and to- 
bacco-jar, and an upper room. 

Those early tales of the troop were done at a 
sweep, at a sitting, as newspaper stories are done. 
Begun in Tampa, with the regular newspaper- 
letter work, the first finishings were made dur- 
ing furlough. Many settings were formed in the 
prison at Manati, but that was not the place to 
see a full story. The emotions of production 
seemed now to gather in full. Certain hours, the 
pictures ran out of me — of themselves — fulfilling 
an ideal of greatness and happiness. I have 
sometimes thought of these stories as an ebulli- 
tion from a past life, left-overs from another pack 
which one uses, while he finds himself. 

I shall never forget the sense of writing some- 
thing that I had not known; of seeing a sentence 
before me, wrought of raw emotional fire, yet 
containing a fact, which I had not learned in this 
life. I never weary of pondering this, nor of 
encountering it; of touching the mystery within, 
the wiser worker within. There was less brain 
and sham about those stories than characterised 
hundreds done afterward; they were better as a 
whole than many groups of tales during the next 
seven years. 

I had not studied; had not begun to strain, had 
not been pulled out of myself, by the work of 
other men. I had my regular army men, my 
Porto Rico, Tampa, horses, and the stories told 

[147] 



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in the troop; I had my transports; darkey boys 
that laughed with us through the south; my own 
fevers, abuses, nurses, sufferings, homesickness, 
and more than anything my own hatreds. 
I see now that the biggest thing that had happened, 
was my insubordination as a soldier. I had gone 
blind in the pressure of abominations. It wasn't 
rum; at least, that only fixed my desperation. I 
had tried to fight the system that crushed me at 
every breath. I had known moments of strange 
readiness to fight the army, the whole army, until 
I died. I was only altered and afraid, when the 
order for my discharge took effect in the troop. I 
had been ready to die — just to maim a claw of 
that outfit. Such hatred made the best stories 
of the lot. 

Of education, you know what a farce that was, 
except the Greek. Kipling might have touched 
me a bit; he did later; but my head was not full 
of literary ideals, and I knew not a single literary 
man. 

These were my stories — that was the incredible 
thing. I remember one that would not let me 
go — though it was long and I was exhausted, al- 
most incoherent with it. The effects appeared 
ahead, one after another, in their inevitability, 
with that cohering line that I lost afterward for 
years at a time. There was ecstasy in this pro- 
duction. I used darkey-talk without study; 
built the whole fight at San Juan hill from the 

[ 148 ] 



PENELOPE 



glimpse I had from Santiago harbour that hot day 
before the operation. It was the best of the 
group and sold to a decent magazine some weeks 
afterward for forty dollars. I remember work- 
ing on it all day — long-hand — until late, and 
then reading it to my mother and grandmother 
and aunt in the same old dining-room below, my 
voice breaking at the climax, because it had come 
so true and fast and to me. 

My mother loved it; my grandmother nodded; 
my aunt said it was better than I had done be- 
fore — -splendid from her. She would tell others 
what promise was in my work; to others, she 
would think of me as a boy just beginning, but to 
me she would say what she thought, according to 
her best standards. It hurt, often like a whip at 
the time, but she did me much good through 
those years. Sane and critical, especially if I 
touched a woman in a story; (extra-especially if 
I were not brisk about it,) she would burn me. 
Moments, I hated her position — but always, I 
wanted her word. 

The brain of a real worker is but the machine 
upon which his product is played. The brain 
lowers the vibration, synthesises the pictures, so 
that others can see. A man's brain is the product 
of his time and place; it interprets for his hour. 
I had not begun to use brain in these early tales. 
Mine was obedient, as a recruit in the army is 
obedient, because it knew so little and was over- 

[149] 



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awed. When the brain began to learn its im- 
portance, began to be coloured with the thoughts 
of others, and to be struck with the methods of 
others, — naturally the ebullition of the real self 
was betrayed. My work, not being purely my 
own for years afterward, was inferior to these 
early passions of expression. 

Brain is the crown-part of the animal that re- 
bels, when a man seeks to climb out of the herd 
into individuality. I have sometimes thought 
that every physical force of the body is hostile to 
the production of real work. The stomach de- 
mands food and drink and stimulus ; the pleasure 
idea obtrudes, all that is fleshly is against one; 
and the devil of it is, when you do drive decently 
through these ordeals of opposition, and perform 
comparatively well a fair task, (your own in- 
imitable hall-mark showing here and there,) the 
brain and all the other forces of flesh, rise up say- 
ing "We did it." This is identifying one's self 
emotionally with one's work, and it must stop 
before the work is free from taint. All the lower 
forces of self must be conquered, before man is at 
his best. 

I was very far from such conquest. The only 
value of this first work, was my brain innocence. 
It had not felt itself, and did not obstruct, other 
than through its very small calibre, the pictures 
so gripping to me. . . . However, you cannot 
shoot a twelve-inch shell through an eight-inch 

[150] 



PENELOPE 



bore; neither can you express a man's soul 
through a boy's brain. So the brain must be 
brought up to comparable form; this is the long 
slow road. Brain-products on the way are not 
pure. They come into the world inherent with 
a sickness that begins to disintegrate them at 
once, as flesh begins to die as soon as it is con- 
ceived. Before I had finished the sheaf of seven- 
teen tales, (which made a volume, long since out 
of print,) my work had fallen down. 

There was much that was reasonable about the 
next few months at home. My interests were 
up-town. My mother was startled at the pro- 
portion of the forty dollars which I gave her. 
The Sunday papers were using some of my work; 
life was simple, work engrossed me, and there 
were evenings with Penelope in the house of hap- 
piness. She was all that I had never known. In 
my house we were all individuals with hard 
edges that ground upon one another. This of 
hers was all a family, pulling together, very much 
one. Penelope was the one of all, superbly un- 
selfish. She spoiled me; gave too much. I was 
far from being fine enough, not to get accustomed 
to this unsearchable source of kindness. There 
was something of the oriental about her — in sub- 
mission, service, and adjustment of self to the 
male mood. 

The man whom she had married was a much 
better man than I, but he had not brought out the 

[151] 



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splendid things in her. He had been kind; he 
had adored her; his life was clean. Her life was 
smothered with him, though she did not know it, 
because she could not live her ordained part. 

She was mother, every inch. Her first tears 
at that memorable supper had been for the boy 
afield, suffering and unmothered. In all that had 
to do with motherhood, she was genius. Against 
her will, against all that she knew with her mind, 
this nature of hers seized upon me, as upon a 
life-work. Since she gave so much, I gave lit- 
tle; but I came to need her insistently. Her 
older brother heard of the affair of my first de- 
parture, and undertook to end our story. Pene- 
lope mothered me through that, as through the 
other fevers. She told him that she preferred a 
man who had finished with such things before 
he really took a woman. I have had many years 
to think of that summer, and yet I have never 
come to the end of the wonder of Penelope's giv- 
ing. One evening, before it was quite dark, she 
whistled me to come upstairs. I kissed her 
cheek, and as she turned on the light, I noted that 
the other cheek had a tiny bruise upon it. 

"What's that green mark?" I asked. 

"It's envy," she said. . • . 

One day that summer, I went to a certain 
downtown room. The woman of the strawber- 
ries was there, desperately ill. Her lips were 
dry and hot, her face contorted with pain. She 

[152] 



PENELOPE 



needed some money. I went away, saying that 
I would try to get it. I never saw her again. 
She was taken that day to a place where I could 
not go. She lived but a few hours. . . . Al- 
ways after the great stresses, I have written a 
book. Hers was written. It was the first, and 
was meant for destruction. Perhaps that is the 
reason that she came to life in a chapter many 
years later. . . . "There was just a glimpse of 
light hair, a red-lipped profile and slow shining 
dark eyes. She w r as not even like Adelaide, but 
a blood sister in temperament. Bedient saw this 
in her hands, wrists, lips and skin, in the pure 
elemental passion w 7 hich came from her every 
tone and motion. One of the insatiate — yet frail 
and lovely and scented like a carnation; a white 
flower, red-tipped— sublimate of earth perfume 
. . . one of those desert-women who love so 
fiercely and so fruitlessly; whose relations with 
men who do not weave, but only bind the selvage 
of the human fabric/ 5 

The magazine that purchased the best of the 
trooper tales, was the property of the house that 
published the sheaf of stories in a volume. Be- 
tween the two, I was advanced enough money 
to take me to the Philippines. I arranged to sup- 
ply war-letters to a group of newspapers, of 
which my old paper in Detroit, was the nucleus. 

There was drinking in those last days before 
leaving to sail from Vancouver, but I had prom- 

[153] 



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ised to go through the whole campaign dry, and 
my mother and Penelope stood out in all great- 
ness on their separate hills. ... I awoke very 
ill, in a Pullman berth that was hard and lumpy 
with flasks, presented during the last hours of 
the night before. All were consigned the next 
morning to the porter, and I was full of natural 
vim again before we crossed the Rockies. Sev- 
eral weeks later, after a day of skirmish fighting 
with General McArthur, north of Manila, I lay 
down to sleep in the same room with General 
Joe Wheeler. It struck me with a force never 
to be forgotten, that I, the same creature, less 
than a year before, had dug sinks, and had been 
considered depraved by the enlisted men of the 
regular army. The sham of it all held me 
iast. • • • 



[ 154] 



i8 
LUZON 



MANILA was like a steam-room when 
I arrived. Quarters were found at 
San Pedro Macati, with a volun- 
teer outfit, largely recruited from 
Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, my especial 
newspaper district. The Colonel was good to me, 
but evinced a desire to read copy before it was 
sent. I left his mess in good nature, and found 
a comfortable bunk among his soldiers in Manila, 
near San Sebastian cathedral, where the regi- 
mental quartermaster held forth. I liked the 
boys there, and one Baum, a corporal, sometime 
cook, was brother and sister to me. 

I wrote several columns each day when not 
in the field. Baum would make coffee late at 
night. We had a little monkey named Hooligan 
— its face the saddest and most ancient in the 
world— as if it had seen the death of all the 
Saviours, and had wept with all the Marys. 
Hooligan was tortured with incessant fears — 
fears of the dark like a baby. He saw things 

[155] 



MIDSTREAM 



not for our eyes, and cried and cried. His only 
peace was from the magnetism of men. A hand 
of Baum's or mine would quiet him — as men are 
quieted from the source of strength. 

Northward the skirmishes were on — Angeles, 
San Fernando, Tarlac, and there I saw my first 
war correspondents. Generals had ceased to dis- 
may me, but here were great men, indeed. They 
moved for my eyes in a daze of colour and action 
and light. Quite as interested in them as in the 
fighting, my gaze was like a lens, the shutter 
popping continually. When I looked up from a 
volley, and saw that a certain John T. had not 
sprawled, but instead, had photographed the line 
of white from the native rifles — a hero was con- 
ceived, in all truth. 

I was still lost in the illusions of service. 
Fighting looked to me a thing for men ; yet riding 
with officers, I had an understanding of the ranks, 
that was not developed elsewhere. There was 
much in my mind, that I did not see clearly 
enough to express at that time, but I saw that it 
was impossible for an officer even to approach the 
point of view of the enlisted man; that his atti- 
tude was only a little less impertinent when he 
tried to. 

One morning soon after dawn, I had coffee 
started, when the cavalry rode through the camp, 
to take brigade lead for the day. This was dur- 
ing the first week of a large expedition into the 

[156] 



LUZON 

southern provinces. The horsemen whisked me 
after them; in fact, I was in the saddle and part 
of the column, by the time the third troop had 
passed— and they moved fast that red morning. 
Perhaps I looked back at the breakfast fire, but 
the first realisation concerned my pony, worn 
from the previous days. I was chucking him un- 
der the chin, so to speak, before the sun was a 
burden. 

Silang and Xndang, sizeable native towns, we 
entered at a gallop and "raise pistol, 55 only to find 
them empty save for the sick, the lame and pariah- 
dogs that barked in the dust. In spite of the 
speed, we could not catch up with the signalling 
belfries that warned the barrios ahead of the 
American raid. The day had flamed up ; the long 
waning was begun, without a halt for food. 
Where the trails were thick with jungle, we met 
the fire from ensconced native parties. I was 
worn back by mid-afternoon to the last troop, the 
white horse outfit, whose captain was admirably 
designed to preserve the illusions of a boy. 

Lean, dark, quiet, I can see Don. C. now, as 
in those shadowy ravines beyond Indang, rolling 
a cigarette with his free hand, sending the report 
ahead that his outfit could not keep up longer 
with the main body. His men and mounts had 
seen service during the several preceding days as 
I had, while the rest of the regiment was fresh. 
He talked very little and so quietly. Weeks 

[157] 



MIDSTREAM 



afield had sieved his troop down to the gold — 
thirty-five or forty men — hard and light and cold- 
nerved. Their faces were sun-blackened; their 
arms and backs blackened through rents and rips, 
for there had been no issue of army shirts in many 
weeks; the horses were bony and fit, just a bit 
over-spent this day. It was a perfect parcel of 
brutes that I was proud to ride with. 

Just a little before dark, we came to a native 
pony tied at the edge of the trail, deep jungle 
on either side. I leaped down to his head, think- 
ing my problem finished — a change of saddle and 
bridle to this fresh sorrel stud. He was picketed 
with heavy wire, seemingly plaited around his 
throat. I started to follow the wire into the bam- 
boo, in the hope the other end would open more 
easily. Captain Don caught me by the collar, 
and yanked me back into the saddle. . . . He 
let me think it out, as we rode on. Of course 
it was a bolo-trap — I, to follow the wire into 
the native knives. ... A man had stopped to 
recinch his mount this day, not fifty yards back. 
The troop heard his cry; found him pinned to 
the trail, through mouth and brain, by a long 
knife. So quickly was it done. 

Don wanted to overtake the regiment that 
night. Darkness was about us and firing, a 
wound or two in our outfit; yet the fast trail 
of the forward troops was still hammered in the 
sand. We had been twelve hours in the sad- 

[158] 



LUZON 

die; my spur was gone; I was prodding the pony 
forward with a broken pencil; coffee was a be- 
yond-earth dream. 

The moon came up brilliantly. We reached 
the rim of a deep ravine, the bamboo bridge of 
which had been partly torn away by the natives, 
since the main body of the cavalry passed. Here 
the white horse troop came to a halt, as the hid- 
den natives intended. They must have been low 
on ammunition about this time. We were 
clumped and quiet, yet their firing was thin and 
wide. 

You could have read a newspaper in that moon- 
light. The stone abutment of the bridge, eight 
inches wide, ran out from the edge of the escarp- 
ment to where the bamboo planking was still in- 
tact. From the end of the trail at the precipice, 
to the good footing, was a distance of ten feet. 
Men could have crossed on the top of the stone 
work, but the thought in the Captain's mind 
never occurred to me. Why did he hesitate here 
under fire? I was shivering with fatigue, though 
the night was hot. 

"Who's got a good quiet horse?" he asked. 

A trooper came forward. 

"See if you can make it," the officer ordered. 
"Give him his head. Don't look back." 

The soldier did not hesitate; his horse went 
out after him on the stone work, slipped and 
whirled downward, with a scream, crashing 

[159] 



MIDSTREAM 



through the small trees that protruded from the 
steep walls of the ravine. We heard the splash 
of water forty feet below. I couldn't see cause 
for criticism, but the Captain spoke low and 
sharply to the trooper; then led forth his own 
splendid mount — "Old Silver," he called him. 

The top of a wall, eight inches wide, ten feet 
long — in betraying moonlight. Silver went over, 
— the same sickening sounds followed, then si- 
lence. I saw Captain Don standing on the wall, 
the hand outstretched that had held the bridle- 
rein. He stepped back and said to me : 

"It can be done. Lead your puppy over." 

It was as he said. My pony followed. I 
stood by him on the undestroyed portion of the 
bridge. The wonderful part to recall was that 
the entire troop followed without accident. It 
took a long time. 

"I never had such a mean sensation, as that, 
— when I let go 'Old Silver's' bridle-rein," the 
Captain confided to me. 

We found shelter in the walled declivity of the 
trail opposite, and waited while Don and a squad 
hunted the trail down into the gorge to rescue 
saddle-bags and troop-papers. . . . And now a 
ghostly nicker came up from the blackness. "Old 
Silver" after many moments, was brought up 
alive. They had found him standing up in the 
water, to which the thick branches of the ravine 
wall had cushioned the fall. 

[160] 



LUZON 

The halt had lamed us all ; there was no going 
further. Among the most dismal words I ever 
heard were those from the Captain, following the 
order to make camp for the night: 

"No fires of any kind, men. We want sleep, 
and fires draw shots. 55 

We would have stood volleys for coffee and 
cooked bacon. Instead, we ate it raw with water 
and hardtack. I stretched out my saddle-blan- 
ket in a small nipa thatch by the trail. The 
last I remember was Don arranging his sen- 
tries. . . . 

"You certainly did well," he said, with the sun- 
light abroad. "Twice a bullet crashed through 
this shack." 

It had been no affair of mine. He was frying 
an extra emergency ration. I was one undivided 
hunger, and took this pellet of sausage appear- 
ance from him, feeling like the fox that had come 
to dine with the crane. My pony refused to get 
up from the fodder field that morning. I al- 
lowed the good little chap to revert to the na- 
tives once more, and climbed into the saddle of 
a missing trooper. Now, most mysteriously, I 
found myself thinking of other men and appreci- 
ating the morn. Astonishing replenishment had 
slipped in upon me — from that bean. 

The Captain was ahead on "Old Silver," just 
a bit lame. We rejoined the main body at Naig 
by the sea. They had met a fight in the gulch 

[161] 



MIDSTREAM 



just before the town was entered. Their dead 
and wounded as usual were in the cathedral. 

I have always thought of him with much re- 
gard — Don. C. of the White Horse troop. Aft- 
erward, word came that he was teaching mathe- 
matics at West Point. I know that he took the 
Luzon campaign in the same spirit that one would 
go out on a hunting trip. Doubtless, he laughed 
at the idea of The States crossing the world to 
break a perfectly proper insurrection on the part 
of century-suffering, priest-ridden Malays. He 
could shrug his shoulders and obey orders; but 
left to himself, he was very much a man, a nat- 
ural aristocrat, and his men loved him. 

It is a curious thing that the degenerative 
forces of the soldier system do not work solely 
in the ranks. The older the officer, the more he 
becomes one with the enlisted men. The chief 
charm of the service is in the freshness of ideal 
which the young officers bring to their work. But 
the life with the line is only a little higher than 
the line itself, of which I was a part in Tampa 
and Porto Rico — a narrow, waiting life — the end 
more or less predestined. It is bad for a man's 
soul to know that he can rise in ordinary course 
only by the death, retirement or disgrace of his 
superiors; and one is shocked by the corrosion 
of the years — the laziness and the gambling, the 
wine and the lost ideal. My old Captain B. who 
fell with the rum and wrote Bad on my paper, 

[ 162 ] 



LUZON 



was not an individual but a type. I saw many 
in the Eastern service, braced upon the lies of 
their life, ease-loving, sour-fleshed ruins — sepa- 
rated from the men of the bunks at the last, only 
by the precarious arrangement of a commission 
and certain dollars the month. 

I rode out of Naig with a pack train and saw 
many days of most wonderful service — all writ- 
ten. Chronology is gone in memory. I remem- 
ber the fires, the wounds, the dead; churches and 
the ringing bells of warning; dead in the cool 
shadows, pariah-dogs, hideous fatigue, maggots in 
the wounds, deep watery trails, the grunting cara- 
baos; the sick and the starving that the natives 
left behind; the scores of towns we entered— 
heat, moonlight and knifed sentries; fruits, sing- 
ing, deep drinking in Manila at the last. . . . 
Yes, it got away from me after four or five 
months; but the first drink I took in that service 
was an accident— from a canteen that I supposed 
to contain just water. One suffers for drinking 
hard in that climate; tissues of the brain break 
down quickly. 

The death of General Lawton was the feature 
of the campaign. He had a great name as a 
fatalist, hard rider and pure soldier; having 
earned it from the Rebellion up. Correspondents 
were not encouraged to follow him, but it was 
said that the General was good to a civilian lucky 
enough to encounter him in the field. 

[163] 



jfc 



MIDSTREAM 
— * 



With several war writers, I called at his head- 
quarters in Manila one afternoon, just as he came 
in from a drive* through adj acent provinces, a hike 
in which it was said that the General had made 
"the niggers climb' trees and jump into the sea." 
... Yes, he was taking the field again in the 
morning. Yes, he would be pleased to have the 
gentlemen go. 

That night I went down with a bundle of mail 
from San Sebastian to the post office in the Es- 
colta, and saw the tail of a cavalry column riding 
out. I inquired what outfit was leaving town, 
and was informed that General Lawton was on 
the trail again. I hurried back, saddled and rode 
out after the cavalry. Rain began, a cold rain; 
all night it rained. 

In the first light next morning the insurgents 
picked out the General from across the river 
of San Mateo — a tall figure, in white helmet 
and yellow oil-skins. I did not see him fall. 
They told me he was placing his troops, sending 
out scouts to find the fords in the swollen river. 
The Remington and Mauser slugs became thick 
about him. A staff officer stepped forward to 
draw the General back out of range, and fell at 
his feet. Lawton leaned over him — was said to 
have fallen across the body of his subordinate. 
He was dead afield at the time we were told to join 
him in Manila. . . . That was all I had — save 
the river, the white puffs among the stone ruins op- 

[ 164] 



% 



LUZON 



posite, the shock that went through me, as through 
the army. A moment before the men were grum- 
bling because they could not have their coffee. 

Somehow I was apart from the army. The 
thing was dawning upon me, that this was the big 
story I came for. Somehow I knew that the men 
had not waited for the fords; that there had been 
drownings and a small massacre across the river. 
The idol of the regular army man had fallen. A 
hush followed that. ... I was on the way back 
alone— sixteen miles — the Novaliches trail. The 
natives always crowd back after an army has 
passed. * . . I saw the stuff the army had tossed 
away in the night, found an officer's kit, partly 
rifled, abandoned probably by some Chinese serv- 
ant, who had slipped out of the column in the 
darkness. My horse was noisy in the wet clay; 
silence otherwise — cold falling rain a part of it — 
stretched the nerves taut. My flesh was caught 
in the old familiar alternations of chill and fever. 

The armjr was far behind; a little barrio ahead. 
I could not go through alone; and yet, all about 
were swimming rice paddies. The sound of my 
horse's hoofs tortured. I turned him loose; he 
was rocking tired anyway. Along the slippery 
dikes, to the right of the barrio, I crept, a mud- 
man. Looking over the clayey edge at last I saw 
three red-breeched native soldiers standing among 
the trees which sheltered the huts. 

I felt as obvious as the rock in a desert land, 

[165] 



MIDSTREAM 



tossed my pistol away, thinking to claim the long 
chance of non-combatant, in case of capture. It 
was rather absurd to do this, but I wasn't right 
with fever. . . . Capture meant the knife, past 
doubt; I hated that thought. It was always 
hideous to me compared to the clean chug of a 
bullet in a busy part of the body. I don't recall 
exactly what occurred after seeing the native sol- 
diers. I did not get around the town that way; 
and yet, can not remember where I struck the 
small American party that saw me through to the 
pumping station. 

I reached the San Sebastian quarters, at mid- 
day, on foot. The major surgeon of the infan- 
try outfit took me in charge; seemed to respect 
my prevailing passion for getting the big story 
off. He fed me quinine that afternoon — seventy 
grains of quinine, by his word. It seemed to me 
as I wrote, that all the pictures came clearly — 
a series of pictures of the night and the dawn 
and the day. I saw the big letter safely aboard 
a ship sailing that night — a ship ahead of any 
other Lawton letter. 

The fever was routed, but I remember the bull 
carts passing on the cobble-stones the next day — 
how they jarred my head, though I lay high above 
the street and a hundred feet back. In the month 
following, I was much in the field. ... I recall 
one terrific trail to Lake Taal, a camp at the 
water's edge in a town called Talisay. There 

[166] 



LUZON 



was vino in that town. A few of us went sleep- 
less and adventurous on it. The air was thick 
with smoke from the big volcano out in the lake. 
There were nine fights to be written within a 
certain two weeks, including the Pony Pack mas- 
sacre, I tried to think them out in order on the 
transport home, but there were drink-gaps 
through all the later Luzon campaigning. A 
man never knows how utterly an animal he is, 
until he stops to think in the midst, or soon after, 
a rush of field service. 

In San Francisco my transportation arrived, 
reading over the Canadian Pacific. I was ex- 
actly nine days reaching Detroit, and had less 
than five dollars expense money. Thin-blooded 
from nearly a year of tropical service, in low 
shoes, without overcoat or blankets; a washout on 
the Shasta route going north; snow-slides in the 
Cascades after we were finally turned eastward; 
nine nights in different day coaches, a bag of 
crackers from time to time, with an onion, an 
apple and a bit of sausage — altogether it was a 
test of vitality. Temperature was fathoms deep 
below zero, up Calgary- way and in Medicine 
Hat; there was a night in the station at St. Paul, 
crackling cold outside, and the steam went down 
after midnight; at last, an hour's wait in Chi- 
cago, one night's ride more, and thirty cents left. 
I wished that I could drug myself and wake up 
at home. . . . There was a large free lunch in a 

[167] 



MIDSTREAM 



saloon in Dearborn Street, a hot stove, a tired 
man playing the piano. I had to have a nickel 
to get up town in Detroit next morning; the rest 
I spent for large glasses of beer, five of them in 
the hour, and somebody bought for the pianist 
and me. ... I was lifted a little, but not 
greatly, though the night passed well enough, 
after the train moved. 




[168] 



19 
COUNTRY 



ONE story of the Luzon campaign, I 
looked up in the newspaper files of 
Detroit. To my dismay I found that 
the first letter in America containing 
the story of General Lawton's death had been 
run on a back page. I had taken chances for 
that story, that I wouldn't have taken five years 
later for all the newspapers in America. It was 
an unforgivable bit of newspaper handling — all 
that was granted, but the thing was done. 

"I couldn't make head nor tail of it," the man- 
aging editor said — the same who came to me 
head down twice one day. 

"It was a ship ahead of any other. I came 
in alone part of the way, over a hostile and live 
hot trail. I took enough quinine to kill a man 
in this country, to get the story done — " 

"You were so full of the whole thing — that 
you didn't tell us what it was all about." 

It was vague. I hadn't done the pictures, as 
they passed before my mind. At the time, it 

[169] 



MIDSTREAM 



seemed that I was carving a series of cameos from 
that night and morning. 

The incident is significant of a long struggle I 
had afterward to bring forth my realisations in 
living flesh for earthly use. The fever of the 
body that day is but a symbol of the emotional 
ecstasy with which the spirit of things is seen by 
one who loves his dreams. If he paints his 
visions before they have come down into flesh (as 
they must, to become significant to men of flesh) 
the result is a mistiness and attenuation of vital- 
ity which can only animate the mind of a vi- 
sionary. 

On the ship coming home, was a discharged 
soldier named Dulin. He was the exact ideal 
— from a city standpoint — of what a story-sol- 
dier should be. I was young enough to fit the 
two together. Dulin was a drunken courageur 
of fine moments and outdoor ideals — tender, 
tragic, game, an obvious ruffian. I put a dozen 
or fifteen stories of action about him with Luzon 
settings; and because I was reeking with colour, 
that I had earned diving through colour — the 
tales weren't so bad. Brain would have betrayed 
them, but I was too close to the animal and the 
field to suffer them to become heady. 

Dulin "caught on" in a syndicate way among 
Sunday newspapers. By the time the fifth was 
released, I had an income and a following — pack 
trains and the trails — smoky trails, rain-sodden 

[170] 



COUNTRY 



trails, red-hot, high-noon trails — -jungle firing, 
moonlight, sizzling bacon, dreams of women and 
home and over all, that animal thing, which 
seems so godlike to the brute and the boy — the 
fear to show the fear of death. 

Toward the last, I was afraid the stories were 
getting away from me. I had the instinct that 
if I went too far, I would show my hand. I 
stopped in the "height of success/ 5 There was 
fear in this, and vanity, but I think something 
pure, too. All the papers wired or wrote me to 
go on. It was not good business to stop, but 
Duiin looked big to me; he seemed done. I pre- 
ferred to pick up a new series. 

My real purpose of it all was to make a book 
of Duiin. I count it the most valuable thing that 
ever happened to me — the final refusal of the 
S. S. McClure Company to make this book. It 
was a squeak. They found bad spots in the 
midst of the "extraordinary moments" of the nar- 
rative. ... Penelope had married me. I was 
twenty-two years old, temperamentally a drunk- 
ard. If my passion for publicity had been ap- 
peased to a degree at this time, my ruin as a man 
and a worker would have been inevitable. Mc- 
Clure's accepted an isolated pack train story for 
the magazine, but sent back Dulin. The editors 
advised me to ruminate over the manuscript for 
three months, to sustain and tighten the work, 
eliminate its weaknesses, get the whole in more 

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lasting form. It had been shaped for newspaper 
needs, they pointed out, and there was a differ- 
ence. 

Now see the smutted boy enraged; observe 
how ready I was for the strong medicine of 
recognition. 

I felt them wrong, insufferably wrong. I was 
busy with a new series — on the eve of abject 
failure. I tossed Dulin aside, loaned the manu- 
script and have never had it back. You can tell 
how deep I had to go, to grind off this arrogance, 
when I say to you that even eight years after- 
ward, I would have counted such a letter as a 
winning, as a success almost, and plunged into 
the work of improvement with the original im- 
petus of the writing. How weak I was, how un- 
steady, when a little newspaper success could sour 
me; the intolerance, the limp spine that could not 
go decently to work again. 

My second newspaper series was ordered 
largely, but did not make good. Newspaper 
markets, one after another, slipped out like weak 
stones in a wall. I saw ephemeral praise die 
down. Timeliness, always treacherous, slunk 
away from Dulin and Luzon, so that I was not 
even tempted to make that struggle over again. 
I did some newspaper feature work, and sold a 
magazine story occasionally, but we were very 
poor. That was God's good for us. I see that 
now. 

[172] 



COUNTRY 



At this time, the volcano Pelee in Martinique 
covered St. Pierre with death. A Chicago news- 
paper wired me on Wednesday, the night after 
the cataclysm: 

"Want to begin publication on Sunday if 
possible, hundred thousand word story based 
on volcano disaster, Martinique. A story of 
love, peril and all kinds of excitement. The 
story to run in daily instalments, two columns 
on a week day and a page on Sunday. Will 
you write it? If so, please come to Chicago 
on first train. You could be thinking out the 
plot w T hile riding. Suggest, as outline for 
plot, a wealthy young American touring West 
Indies on private yacht. Touches at San 
Pierre. Falls in love with beautiful girl whom 
he meets near the statue of Josephine. When 
Pelee first shows evidences of eruption, he, be- 
ing amateur geologist, becomes interested and 
investigates. When experts tell Governor of 
Martinique there's no danger, he asserts there 
is. Tries to induce sweetheart to flee for 
safety. Finally makes up mind to abduct her 
to save her. Gets to her home early morn- 
ing of eruption. Finally saves her after all 
kinds of dire danger, etc. This merely sug- 
gestion. Might play story as written three 
months ago. Remarkably prophetic, etc. 
Would need only a few chapters to start and 
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MIDSTREAM 



thing would work out itself as you go along. 
Please answer to-night what you think. Mat- 
ter, of course, could be syndicated and also 
made into a book which would sell well." 

I find my reply written on the lower margin 
of the old telegram: "You're on. Leave for 
Chicago this morning." The newspaper recon- 
sidered the idea of intimating to the public that 
the story had been written ahead, but the Sun- 
day page appeared — turned in within twenty- four 
hours of my arrival. I was not sufficiently "in 
hand" to do a task of this sort well. I found 
grave worry and deep grinding at times. The 
one illuminating thought in regard to fiction — 
that there is no law — had not yet begun to 
emancipate. With every early line put down, I 
felt that the entire narrative must be considered. 
That was heavy lifting. 

But the month did me good; the strain built 
tissue. There was something in the experience, 
not unlike that hour of perfect teaching in high 
school — when a subject was given and an essay 
demanded without props. The ideas of the tele- 
gram were not carried out, but they had a certain 
prevailing influence. Penelope came over to 
take care of me. Two weeks elapsed before price 
was mentioned. I suggested three hundred dol- 
lars; Penelope said a thousand, as another might 
say: "You had better ask for three-fifty." 

[174] 



COUNTRY 



I choked that night when I asked for five hun- 
dred dollars, and the easy acceptance of this 
price by the managing editor made my head swim. 
Still it was a poor piece of work — poor "Wrath 
of Pelee— " and I was ashamed of it before it 
was done. 

The devil of ambition was now burning me 
night and day, but my stuff had turned the cor- 
ner; all that was blithe and spontaneous subsided. 
I was reading deeply and forgetting the field; 
the sense of origins dimmed. It was the second 
of the tragic transition periods. My drinking 
was done at home now, and in and around my 
work was the study of material science. Dar- 
win, Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, gave me reading, 
and they were splendid wreckers, although the 
personal protestantism in my blood gave long but 
losing battle. This was my one deep dip into 
matter. Penelope and I had a box of spiders in 
the study. We called them Addie, Mamie and 
the like, watched them lay their eggs and coil 
their silk about them. . . . One night, over two 
years after we were married, I looked up from 
the typewriter to find Penelope half-laughing, 
half -crying. I crossed the room. She told me. 
I think Penelope was never sweeter than that 
night — though I see it from now, better than 
then, 

We went to the old house in lower Lincoln 
to live with my mother and grandmother. . . . 

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Yes, the old lady was still sitting there. She 
used to call me if I came in late. She would say 
that no one could tuck her feet in "like Willie." 
She died in there — the room next the dining- 
room — one serene summer morning. Across the 
yard on a neighbour's porch, a canary was singing 
as I have never heard since. 

Everything flattened out in a money way. I 
had to take a newspaper position again, going to 
Pittsburg for it. For six or seven months I did 
a daily column there, verse and story. Except 
that my work was a bit heavy from the science 
now and then, and aspired to be literary, its suc- 
cess was sufficient. I put everything in it; and 
found training for various handlings. I did the 
column to suit me; used it for growth, and in- 
formed the president one day: 

"When I feel this getting to be a grind, you 
won't be able to buy it." 

Yet we needed the money; and my salary I 
considered generous enough. . . . Penelope went 
home to have her baby ; and when I followed, the 
Pittsburg paper sent a letter after me, turning 
me loose. 

We went into the country to live — my mother, 
the new little girl, Penelope and I. We were 
not ready for the country; at least, I was not. 
A man must bring a certain wealth with him, if 
simplicity is to yield her treasure. I had neither 
mastered the town, nor did I consider myself 

[176] 



COUNTRY 



whipped; so I had not finished with the complica- 
tions. My work did not stand up in the silence; 
some vibration that I was artificial enough still 
to require, was denied me. Magazine sales were 
far apart. Because we could live very cheaply, I 
dared do a novel. It failed — a failure that shat- 
tered me for days. I looked about, found that 
I owed everybody; that the whole little town 
was waiting for something that the book was to 
do; that the town had waited months, and I had 
not a single story out. I wrote to a Pittsburg 
millionaire whom I had sketched and interviewed. 
He sent me some money by return mail. Pene- 
lope was rapt with her baby — though I was far 
from fatherhood. From this distance, I am con- 
siderably awed by my attitude toward these two 
of mine at that time, . . . Between the flowers 
of the wall paper in the old house we lived in, I 
had written this sentence: 

"Those things which happen to every one — 
birth and death, for instance — are not of much 
account." 

I disliked the fatuousness which I had often 
found in young fathers. The commonest men I 
knew had children. I refused to believe there 
was anything wonderful in mine. The fact is, 
I could not turn to any of these things — with my 
work faring so badly. I was starving — like a 
hunter who has trailed a single buck for days and 
days. I wanted that buck. I wanted to bring 

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him down, and feed upon him. I wanted the 
world to answer my work. 

Yet my work was not good; I could not see 
then, that it was not good. I scorned the work 
of men who were "making good" ; and yet, in my 
relation with the magazines, I blamed myself 
rather than the editors. 

These were the years in which I worshipped 
the epigram; in which style was everything. I 
did not deem a page of copy worth anything, if 
it did not contain some trick or vanity of my 
own, to identify it from the work of other men. 
I played to the detached thought, and made much 
of it. You could not have made me believe 
that a man's manhood mattered greatly, if he 
wrote well. I bowed to the idea of catching the 
crowd ; yet I did not love the crowd. I was will- 
ing to use sham to catch the crowd, and startling 
effects. I suffered all the shames of self-con- 
sciousness, burned with the defiling fire of ambi- 
tion; knew nothing of the purification of a zeal 
for service. My passion was the simple one, to 
make more noise than my neighbour; to identify 
my name and body with the world's applause. 

My work deserved no answer; yet my head be- 
comes hot now to think of those days, and the 
suffering — which was reflected upon all in my 
house. I was stubborn and thick — working at 
a low vibration — yet I wanted the world. Mc- 
Clure's had refused all my stories for the maga- 

[178] 



COUNTRY 



zine, subsequent to the pack train story. An- 
other man had done the series with Philippine 
colour that the editors had planned for me. . . . 
It seemed almost that I had stopped to grow out 
there in the country. I know that I have had 
days this year, in which I progressed farther than 
during months there. That was one of the long 
nights — and the morning broke giving me a 
chance to go to Asia again. 



[179] 



20 

WORK 



STUDY to show thyself approved unto 
God, a workman that needeth not to 
be ashamed, rightly dividing the word 
of truth. ... I can not rush off to 
another war without a moment's halt. Work and 
life to me mean the same thing. Through work 
in my case, a transfer of consciousness was finally 
made from animalism to a certain manhood. 
This is the most important transaction in the 
world. Our hereditary foes are the priests and 
formalists who continue to separate a man's work 
from his religion. A working idea of God comes 
to the man who has found his work — and the 
splendid discovery invariably follows, that his 
work is the best expression of God. All educa- 
tion that does not first aim to find the student's 
life-work for him is vain, often demoralising; 
because, if the student's individual force is little 
developed, he sinks deeper into the herd, under 
the levelling of the classroom. 

There are no men nor women alive, of too deep 

[180] 



WORK 

visioning, nor of too lustrous a humanity, for the 
task of showing boys and girls their work. No 
other art answers so beautifully. This is the in- 
tensive cultivation of the human spirit. This is 
world-parenthood, the divine professon. 

I would have my country call upon every man 
who shows vision and fineness in any work, to 
serve for an hour or two each day, among the 
schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children 
the mysteries of his daily task — and watching for 
his own among them. 

All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the re- 
sult of the betrayal of one's inner life. One's 
work is not being done. You would not see the 
hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor 
this national madness for buying cheap and sell- 
ing dear- — if as a race we were lifted into our own 
work. 

The value of each man is that he has no dupli- 
cate. The development of his particular ef- 
fectiveness on the constructive side, is the one im- 
portant thing for him to begin. A man is at his 
best when he is at his work; his soul breathes 
then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the lower 
the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a 
task for him to distinguish ; but here is the oppor- 
tunity for all of us to be more eager and tender. 

When I wrote to Washington asking how to 
plant asparagus, and found the answer; when I 
asked about field-stones and had the output of the 

[181] 



MIDSTREAM 



Smithsonian institute turned over to me — my 
throat choked; something sang all around; the 
years I had hated, put on strange brightenings. 
I had written Home for guidance. Our national 
Father had answered. Full, eager and honest, 
the answer came — the work of specialists which 
had moved on silently for years. I saw the 
brotherhood of the race in that — for that can 
only come to be in a Fatherland. 

So the Father of us all answers when we do 
our work well. His revelations rain down, ac- 
cording to our receptivity. All our struggle and 
training is to reach this receptivity. We must 
master the body first; then the brain — after that, 
we receive. Thus you see how work and religion 
are one; how all our years of training, in the 
thrall of perfecting our task, is but a mastering of 
body and brain; how it runs parallel to the aus- 
terities of the religionist who inflicts tortures upon 
his body to conquer it, and the terrors of concen- 
tration upon his brain to keep it silent, in order 
to hear the soul's voice. 

All pure preparation for expression in the work 
we love, integrates immortality. All the tests 
and temptations of the world are offered merely 
for us to master them. All evolution from the 
rock, through lichen, limpet, lizard, through the 
rising spines to manhood, and through man's liv- 
ing soul, to prophecy and divinity, — is but a 
perfecting of our receptivity to the revelations of 

[ 182 ] 



WORK 



God. We refine to higher and higher vibrations, 
each revelation which we reach, changing the 
world through our expression of it. The roof of 
earth is the floor of heaven. The upper node of 
human receptivity touches the lower plane of spir- 
itual revelation — and the result is a remembered 
human utterance. The orbit of the satellite has 
intersected the orbit of its primary. All dimen- 
sions of evolution are reached in this way; the 
highest plant becomes the lowest animal. The 
first resulting flashes of contact, are only sugges- 
tions of the steady flame to come. 

The highest expressions of human genius in the 
past are but suggestions of that which is to be the 
steady consciousness of the world-men of the fu- 
ture. 

I can hardly wait to tell you of such things 
alone; they break out from this narrative of sor- 
did affairs, from the slow grind of the years; yet 
it was this grinding that gave me surface to re- 
ceive certain realisations; and it is the years that 
will enflesh them for other men, as no formal es- 
say could do. I do not want to give you visions. 
I want them blood and bone to move among men 
— the spirit shining through. 

Give a man his work and you may watch at 
your leisure, the clean-up of his morals and man- 
ners. Those who are best loved by the angels, 
receive not thrones, but a task. I would rather 

[183] 



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have the curse of Cain, than the temperament to 
choose a work because it is easy. 

Real work becomes easy only when the man 
has perfected his instrument, the body and brain. 
Because this instrument is temporal, it has a 
height and limitation to reach. There is a year 
in which the sutures close. That man is a mas- 
ter, who has fulfilled his possibilities — whether 
tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or carpenter, 
hammering periods with nails. Real manhood 
makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such a 
man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic 
to finer forces. 

No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, 
the refinement of body and brain, is a novitiate 
for the higher life — for the purer receptivity — 
and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with 
breaks here and there in the cohering line. 

The achievement of mastery brings with it the 
best period of a human life. After the stress, the 
relaxation. In its very nature, this relaxation is 
essential, for the pure receptivity can only come 
when the tensity of the fight is done. If your 
horse is trained, you do not need to picket him, 
and watch lest he hang himself. Your body has 
learned obedience; you may forget it in the trance 
of work. Indeed, the body becomes automatic 
and healthy alone, when it permits you to forget 
it, for that is the nature of its servitude to the 
soul. Having mastered the brain, you may turn 

[184] 



WORK 

it free. All its equipment will come to call. . . . 
You lie in the prairie — looking at the majestic 
stars, Polaris at your head, your arms stretched 
out to Vega and Capella, your eyes lost in the 
strong tender light of Arcturus — your animals at 
peace about you in clean pastures. They have 
earned their freedom, because they have learned 
your voice. 

The best period of a man's life ; days of safety 
and content; long hours in the pure trance of 
work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is ended, 
the finished forces turn outward in service. Ac- 
cording to the measure of the giving is the re- 
plenishment in vitality. The pure trance of 
work, the different reservoirs of power opening 
so softly; the instrument in pure listening — long 
forenoons passing, without a single instant of self- 
consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even 
awareness of the body. 

A man must rise above the self to utter for the 
world, must rise above the brain, if he is to be the 
instrument of the forces which drive the world. 
In the same way that one's vanities and one's emo- 
tions throw out the purpose of a production, so 
does the brain with what it knows, and what it 
hears and reads. The brain's uppermost thought 
is an obstruction that invariably breaks the line 
of the still higher instrumentation. The brain's 
business is to receive. This is the old law for the 
attainment of the higher life — the yielding, the 

[185] 



MIDSTREAM 



submission of self; the Thy Will be Done of mat- 
ter to spirit. 

This is a turning to the very source of life — 
as Mother Earth turns her fields to the sun. 

Every law that makes for man's finer work- 
manship, makes for his higher life. The mastery 
of self prepares man to make his answer to the 
world for his being. The man who has mastered 
himself is one with all. Castor and Pollux tell 
him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and 
lovely from the plant to the planet, because man 
is a lover, when he has mastered himself. All 
the folded treasures and open highways of the 
mind; its multitude of experiences and unreckon- 
able possessions — are given over to the creative, 
and universal force, — the same force that is lus- 
trous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memo- 
rable in human heroism, immortal in man's love 
for his fellow man. 

This force alone holds the workman true 
through his task. He, first of all, feels the up- 
lift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the power of 
the superb life-force passing through him. . . . 
This is rhythm; this is the cohering line; this is 
being the One. But there are no two instruments 
alike, since we have come up by different roads 
from the rock; and though we achieve the very 
sanctity of self-command, our inimitable hall- 
mark is wrought in the fabric of our task. 

I would have been dead long since, and detest- 
[186] 



WORK 



able in every detail before the passing — but for 
the blessedness of work. I have emerged from 
hideous dissipation,— shaking, puerile, as ripe 
seemingly for the merciful bullet, as the insect- 
tortured beast, loose in the field to die. Again 
and again have I been so, yet by God's good plan, 
— I have found myself once more, here, at the ma- 
chine, as now. I have felt my own body resume 
life, its wastes and poisons relaxing their death- 
hold, answering the movements which mean life. 
I have sensed the devils leaving my brain; and 
prevented their return, — through this godly 
guardian, work. Every utterance worth the mak- 
ing from this instrument, has done more for me 
than it could possibly do for another. I love my 
work. As servant of it, I am here, on my way, 
and all is well. 



[187] 



21 

MANCHURIA 



I SAW Penelope better from the distance, 
and the little girl. The mystery of them 
prevailed upon me at sea, compounded 
with the distance, my mother moving 
around them. There is no doubt about one 
lonely man. The physical journeys and adven- 
tures of that period are done. I have exhausted 
the soldier and correspondent; written out the 
bleakness of the Japanese as a nation in its mili- 
tary state of growth; the shame and hidden bril- 
liance of Russia,— that great orb among the na- 
tions which seems companioned, and often all but 
occulted, by a dead planet. 

The Asiatic story of a recent fiction character 
runs close to mine. This particular story-man 
seems to have something of his author's old sense 
of inferiority, also, the need of deep grinding. 
His open wound was mine, a touch of deck-pas- 
sage, and the fight to get home on the transport, 
wherein I failed at last. 

His sudden discovers in Japan that he was out 
fl88] 



MANCHURIA 



"on a shoestring"; his life in the Japanese Inn 
for many waiting weeks, disbarment from place 
with the second Japanese army, night rides with 
Amoya-san; finally his great adventure in friend- 
ship and interminable journey to New Chwang 
and the Russian field—these are almost iden- 
tically my experiences. 

From this distance, through all that service, I 
have to stop and think step by step — which ex- 
periences were lived in the body, and which were 
enacted with the vitalities and properties of the 
fiction mind. The difference is certainly not one 
of realness to me; in fact, I am less in a "daze" 
in the run of a story, than in an exterior sequence 
6f events. 

This fact made it very clear that as we grow, 
our experiences are gained mentally rather than 
physically. The suspicion deepens now, how- 
ever, that we have not ceased to be boys, until the 
really important experiences of life are neither 
physical nor mental, but spiritual. I tried to 
work this thought out with the same fiction-man, 
placing him alone, in a depression, and acquaint- 
ing him with a conviction of his leprous condi- 
tion. He faced out death, and the failure of his 
ambition — to him, worse than death — reaching 
the point in which he could say without strain, 
"Let it come." The whole experience was 
psychological, but he drew the full character-im- 
print from the experience, far more than a lower 

[189] 



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human organism could have drawn from years of 
dying from the disease itself. This in its way 
was a recent experience of mine. I was not the 
same afterward. One's attitude toward death is 
determined altogether by the state of his inner 
life. 

Always in Detroit I had a fountain of knowl- 
edge in C. D. C. During the science days, espe- 
cially, he helped me — long walks and night 
talks — always ahead of me in reading and deeper 
among the facts. Pittsburg gave me the remark- 
able J. Ed. L., a newspaper friend of fine flavour 
and quality, an unfailing hand from him in my 
glooms. The pearl of a woman he married, I 
have for a friend — that was one of the best things 
J. Ed. did. There was another strong and ruddy 
heart in Pittsburg for me, Grif A., a compacter of 
my science, a mellower of man-stuff, such as mine 
was. These are strong men; another appeared 
during the Russo-Japanese war. 

This Grant W., a Californian, not only staked 
me for the Manchurian venture, when things 
went badly in Japan, but went along. It was a 
significant journey apart from the war stuff 
which requires no chronicle. Grant had an idea 
of God — and he gave it to me through many 
nights and days. I rebelled, even though I felt 
it sinking in; I gathered all my materials against 
it, but they merely sunk or swam according to 
their gravity. I got it against my will and 

[190] 



MANCHURIA 



against my ancestors — especially because Grant 
was my idea of a man in so many ways. 

We took a lot of different ships to get to New 
Chwang — -a three weeks' journey, with stops at 
Shanghai, Chifu, Tientsin and Shanhaikwan. I 
was crude and a ruffian; I think there must have 
been something terrible to him in my toiling, for 
I filled space night and day, and drank through 
the last half of the day's work. He was ill, a 
gentleman, and had above me that ten years 
which most changes a man— yet he stood by. I 
measured every idea of mine according to his, and 
was always proven short; how short, I did not 
know in many cases until afterward. 

I went alone one afternoon through the na- 
tive city of Chifu. In an hour or so, everything 
half-human and horrible was revealed. It was 
like a swift review of man's long course from 
the ape. I wrote the story of it that night, on 
the only basis that a man can account for such 
things- — the cohering line of spirit, on which 
many births are strung; of man making his world 
for a season, and as sorry a job of it, as did the 
Prodigal Son. 

I did not see all this then, as now: That we 
reach the end of simple consciousness under the 
divine plan; that as self-conscious men we go 
forth and find the only hell there is; that the 
return to the Father's house with world-conscious- 
ness is the vital hope of the true spirits of this 

[191] 



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hour. I could not grasp then that we meet hell 
on our journeys only to impress upon us the 
splendour of our divine right; that in no other 
way can we earn a sympathetic understanding of 
the world and our longing for the illumination 
of Home; that we can not be the masters of our 
property until we have come to appreciate it, 
through the savage sufferings of our going forth. 

What I saw that day, in the native-city of 
Chifu, took on a certain larger dimension from 
all Grant had given me on the ships. I read 
the story to him that night. He smiled and 
called it good. It found a real answer in Chi- 
cago. From this first glimpse into the eternal 
background of causation, the prevailing passion 
of my life arose. 

We crossed the Liao in the night, reached a 
Chinese hostelry in the midst of the Russian 
garrison in a blackness so thick, that we had to 
touch our guide's shoulder through certain wind- 
ings. A centipede killed with a black note-book 
on the wall that night recalls the date 4, 4, '04. 
Grant and I were aroused in the dawn by 
the singing Russians. One of the greatest mo- 
ments of my life — that brigade swinging through 
the Chinese street. I was lifted plane by plane, 
up from the deep fathoms of fatigue, (and through 
that strange borderland, where we may look back- 
ward and forward,) into upstanding inspiration, 
from that mighty music. We climbed out of 

[ 192] 



MANCHURIA 



the window to a roof below us. I waved at the 
peasant-soldiers — voice broken and tears stream- 
ing down, When I turned to clutch Grant it 
was the same with him. I think I first saw the 
Ploughman there. 

A poisoned wound became malignant at this 
time. It was like a scald locally, and fevered 
me throughout. I had to leave the field finally 
for care; for many days and nights was without 
sleep. Deep dark failure was upon me. The 
journey back to Japan was a steady beat of 
agony, sometimes in the jam of Chinese refu- 
gees; sometimes massed with the Chinese of the 
deck-passage. 

My mind was taking only the pictures, but 
deeper realisations were enacted in that long 
passage. I had come to see the battle, staked 
everything for the battle, but that was not 
granted me. Instead I saw the deeper havoc of 
war, the dreg-men of the world, the singing 
peasants — down-life, crushed life, body-con- 
sciousness. I did not regard Chinese and 
Russian under glass, nor examine them as a pass- 
ing tourist. I saw something that no photo- 
grapher's lens ever caught. I lay in the dirt 
with the poorest men in the world. I looked 
into their faces and saw myself. In the depth of 
agony — in the mystic revelations of it — I once 
reached out my hand, and it was taken by the 
yellow hand of a coolie. The touch shook a 

[193] 



MIDSTREAM 



waver of consciousness through the thickness of 
semi-delirium, and turning I found the slant eyes 
of a brother in brutalisation. How poor in pic- 
tures are the battle lines of a hundred campaigns 
compared to the miracle of that. 

Japan was like home after such a journey. 
They welcomed me at the little Japanese Inn, 
and the fulness of it made my voice break. . . . 
Dickey B. was there, his big work at Port Arthur 
yet to do. . . . He was counting nickels and 
dimes, as I had been forced to do always; and 
yet, it was through him that I made the steamer 
in the harbour. I had two hundred dollars com- 
ing in the mails, and turned over an order for it 
to the American Consul. Dickey got me passage 
money from the war men, while I writhed at the 
thought. Only utter downness, made this ac- 
ceptance possible. There was another operation 
at sea for me; but the wounds, neither old nor 
new, would heal. In fact, I was home, before 
these ruins began to repair. 



[ 194] 



22 

ART-LAMPS 



IN the next year something went wrong with 
my war-stuff. ... I had gone from the 
country to Chicago during the autumn, 
w T hen the last fighting of the campaign 
was on. With some knowledge of terrain and 
troops, I followed the war-cable game with "ex- 
pert" effrontery, for a newspaper that was spend- 
ing a fortune to cover the battles. I learned 
much from the work of other men. But I had 
heard the Russians sing. I had found in the 
eyes of that Chinese— a brother not a stranger. 

It would seem that I could go straight and 
say this; that this tremendous thing, worth lives 
of degradation to accomplish, should be uttered 
at once. It is a simple thing; other men have 
found it; Saviours of men have told us that it 
is the Grail, the final chivalry; but I was not 
ready for such simple things, for sane and holy 
things like this. The simplicity of the peasant 
was behind me; the simplicity of the seer far 
ahead. I was between, in the hell and compile 

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cation of self-consciousness. All misery was de- 
signed to stimulate my emerging. Perhaps the 
something that was wrong with my war-stuff, 
had to do with the turn upward; in any event, 
something was conceived within, a long bearing. 

In the midst of a battle-story, a certain scorn 
would come over me, irresistible — for the thing 
itself, and for the men of the wars I had seen, 
so stupid and short-sighted and engrossed. My 
brain wanted to make the pictures that the mar- 
kets wanted; but something within laughed at 
them; made monkeys of them. I was not 
finished enough to show the fatuousness of things 
as they are. That is an adult's business. 

We went back to Detroit for the winter — the 
old house in lower Lincoln again. I found a 
little to do in a Sunday paper way, while I fought 
out the bigger thing that would not let me rest. 
Hard poverty came again. That was all 
right. . . . There was V. O. B. — a little fight- 
ing newspaper woman whom I used to see, when 
I took my copy down to the paper. She loved 
animals and hated men; had beautiful eyes and 
a tonic acidity of utterance. There was usually 
a lost dog under her chair. The next day you 
would see it washed, possibly ribboned. Many 
a time I have stood by waiting for the accus- 
tomed word from V. O. B. since I admired her 
much, while she called whole lists of friends to 
find a home for the current stranger-forlorn. 

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ART-LAMPS 



She was furiously good. One day she said to 
me: 

"Billy Comfort, why don't you stop lying to 
yourself?" 

There is no immediate connection — just that. 
It was a jew r el she gave me. The longer I live, 
the more I thank her for it. That proved a 
first-magnitude moment — like the Russian sing- 
ing, and the yellow hand, my hand touched. . . . 
There was drinking; it seems that I had begun to 
accept this as a handicap. One day, in the lower 
hall of the newspaper building, an editor of the 
paper drew me aside and asked in the manner of 
dark secrecy: 

"Where do you study theosophy?" 

"I don't," saidl. 

"You write it." 

I asked what it was. He thought I was jok- 
ing, but finally said : 

"The articles of yours which they run upstairs 
are pure theosophy. You preach reincarnation 
in every line." 

He promised to bring me a book of theosophy. 
I fell to thinking of the effect of talks with Grant 
W. in Asia. He was familiar with Hindu 
literature, but I thought of him as a blend of 
Christian-mystic and anarchist. As for rein- 
carnation it seemed to me beyond discussion. I 
had only to identify the word, in order to realise 
that it meant something which was already a 

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conviction — something that had broken forth 
from within, when I passed through the native 
quarter of Chifu that day. I have never under- 
taken to explain the process of our various re- 
births upon one cohering line of spiritual iden- 
tity; but with me, something of the sort is settled, 
and forms the basis of all thinking; so completely 
established that I often forget to explain. 

The editor gave me a letter of introduction to 
one of the ancient wisdom classes of Detroit; 
also an Annie Besant book — a little one on 
Thought-Power and Control, which gave me 
great value. I liked the class. A new period 
was begun. I stopped drinking, became a vege- 
tarian. Material science never gripped me as did 
these metaphysical affairs. I saw more clearly 
Saint Paul and Isaiah; the figure of Jesus came 
a step nearer. Frequently I read five or seven 
hours the day. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, 
(which some one said wasn't esoteric and wasn't 
Buddhism,) stretched my skull again, gave me 
new brain-breathing, as the Greek had done years 
before. I shall never forget the day when I 
caught an imperfect glimpse of our solar sys- 
tem's general movement and rhythm — as one 
might see it all a little apart from earth. Dur- 
ing these months I met M. R., a Detroit young 
woman, the resources of whose wisdom and good 
taste are apparently as inexhaustible to-day, as 
they seemed to me then. I read more of the 

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ART-LAMPS 



straight Hindu literature toward the last; some 
H. P. B., but treasure the Bhagavad Gita out of 
it alL The writings of Swami Vivekananda 
(whose part in my first newspaper position has 
been told) have appealed to me as strong and 
pure work. His service in this country is more 
and more significant as the perspective lengthens. 
H. P. B. needs no sanction of mine, nor am I 
yet ready to furnish one; but red or yellow or 
white, there is certainly a solar quality and di- 
mension to that woman. She is yet far from 
culmination — hardly lifted above the horizon 
mists. 

Though I am not a theosophist, nor cultist of 
any kind, nothing but good came to me from 
those days. 

I was doing another novel, around the vol- 
cano Pelee. The thing appealed to me as calling 
to be done. The bundle of Chicago news- 
papers containing the other story was unopened, 
but the tropical setting in insular French seemed 
to be mine. I gave it all I had; went into the 
closet every morning to practise meditation, lived 
and dreamed the story out. ... I was cool from 
the diet; and dry from reading which was not yet 
mine. The woman of the story was an effort. 
I remember how hard it was for her to speak; 
how I re-wrote and doctored her conversations. 
If I should meet a tithe of that strain now in 
the making of a character, I should know in- 

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stantly that the creature was impossible. The 
big volcano worked better. There were worth- 
while moments there. But I remember the whole 
story, as one of intense labour. 

How long is the way. Had any one told me 
then that my work was bound to fail because it 
taxed me too deeply, I should have answered in 
anger. Yet this is true: Wherever the brain 
works hard, there is imitation and imperfection. 
No great book of a creative kind was ever done 
by prodigious brain effort. The strain is ap- 
parent to those who discern. Brain struggle can- 
not hold John and Mary true to themselves. 
Brain is whimsical, different every day; it is part 
of the body that dies; that's the truth of it. 
The body that lives and the work that lives is 
a deeper expression. 

All crudity in life and workmanship come 
from the imperfection of our faculty for self- 
criticism. Years of strain under the drive of 
ambition, reinforce and expand the tissue of the 
instrument, as surely as labour builds the arm 
and deep-breathing the chest. The infinite fail- 
ures of such years are consummate in their work 
of sensitising the faculty of self-criticism. All 
fine production is a guarantee of the producer's 
good taste. To appear at all, the product has to 
run through the arsenals of self-criticism, as 
through gleaming rows of steel. The work is 
not good until the critical faculty is rhythmic 

[200] 



ART-LAMPS 

with the instrument; its operation silent and un- 
obtrusive. A man consciously avoiding a cer- 
tain evil, or conscious of many pitfalls, is still 
painfully hampered. One by one, these rocks 
and shoals must be charted for the inner eye. 
This is knowledge of evil, as necessary to the 
worker and the saint, as his aspiration to do good. 
The value of a man's failures is not finished until 
his avoidance of the causes of failure becomes 
automatic. This, too, is part of the brain 
struggle. 

The worker is only ready for his real part 
when ail these brain-matters are concluded, and 
he ceases to be conscious of his development; 
when every voice has its message of good and 
evil, but is powerless to break the cohering line 
of individuality; when the living voices out of 
the past sustain but never intrude; when tech- 
nique, style, knowledge, and self-critical faculty 
are finished, and like healthy organs of the body, 
perform their work silently, without pain and 
distraction. 

There are no two ways about the struggle be- 
ing hard. Many good men use up their in- 
trinsic vitality on the way, but more fall in the 
by-ways. It is much easier to tell how great 
work is done than to spend the entire precious 
period up to middle life, in the torturing at- 
mosphere of self-reformation; much easier to turn 
a reasonable brain-readiness and mediocre equip- 

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ment to supplement the work that has already 
been done, than to set about breaking new paths ; 
much easier for the novelist of to-day to build 
his products in a mid- Victorian frame and set- 
ting, than to write from the ruck of this mar- 
vellous modern hour. That which has been pub- 
licly sanctioned passes more readily through the 
critical training* of the brain, than any message 
of the absolutely new. A common idea com- 
monly expressed is far more apt to run the gamut 
of technical knowledge, than a big new idea 
blazingly expressed. 

According to the wealth of equipment is the 
slowness of its conformation. Every invention 
that contains a revolutionary idea is at first 
crudely embodied; but thousands follow who are 
capable of refining the idea. Many critics 
would rather have the laws preserved than the 
idea expressed; but these are not reckoned with 
by the producer at the source of things. He 
breaks laws for the installation of better laws; 
perhaps he will say — there is no law. 

The company of fellow-workers for more than 
one week in the year is contamination. Better 
an island and one book, than long exposure to 
the coalesced brilliance wasted in a club library. 
Many a man has had a thought, and lost it lis- 
tening to others. It is the levelling of the school- 
room again. The young worker who incor- 
porates the methods of other men, finds himself 

[202] 



ART-LAMPS 



in middle-life lost in ephemeral fashions. The 
real worker goes his way alone. Standing 
alone — that is the way of fine work and of pure 
living. Again, the training for the one is the 
training for the other; all that has to do with 
real work, has to do with the life that lasts. 

You will hear them talk under the art-lamps — 
of style and effects, of the sense of the soul. 
One does not feel his soul when he is rhythmic 
with it. He is the soul when spiritual conscious- 
ness has arrived. His life and work breathe 
effects — because he is an individual. The fin- 
ished character threads effects, as pearls upon a 
string. The necklace is the aim — not the cut 
gem. 

There is a devil in the room where art is be- 
ing discussed. Art has ceased to parallel reality. 
An art of to-day is named for the degree of its 
tangent from reality, So often has a man been 
clamped to mediocrity from listening to other 
men, from long discussion of effects, and long 
brooding upon methods. Real talk is about the 
thing — not how to do it. So often the result of 
these gatherings of artists — is that tragic turning 
to art as aim. Before God, we are not here to 
be artists, but men. 



[208] 



23 

TRINITIES 



SO infallibly does the self intrude. I 
find myself pointing the way with a 
certain gusto — the way that was forced 
upon me. I was always in such poverty 
that an art club was an impossible pavilion. I 
was much afield, and those men and women who 
touched my life were divinely busy showing me 
by their lives and not by their words, what is 
real under heaven. Again and again, my life has 
been turned from perversion, by the bestowals of 
others — glad bestowals of high human value — 
again and again and again. 

You have seen some of my home-comings. 
My whole life is marked with maimed home- 
comings — from war and drink and dishonour — 
and always I have found love and healing, from 
my mother and Penelope, and afterward from 
the little girl. Never was the sense given to 
me from them of my incumbrance and appari- 
tion. At every falling, I have been lifted. The 
passionate yearning which comes to a man afield, 

[204] 



TRINITIES 

across the world, for those few whom the dis- 
tance has not effaced — the ever-calling, ever- 
beckoning few— is a sound influence in man-con- 
struction. Even though I returned after the 
healing, to this furious illusion of world-con- 
quest, I could not utterly forget the miracles of 
compassion. 

At the end of seven months of study, dieting, 
concentration-practise, and novel-building, I took 
on the result to New York. Money to get there 
was all I could borrow. I would not trust the 
manuscript to express. 

I found Grant W. and Dickey B. The old 
trinity of the Japanese Inn was complete. 
Dickey was on the high tide after his Port 
Arthur conquest, a very busy young man ; yet not 
changed badly. He had always been imperi- 
ous — even when counting nickels and dimes — a 
deep, lucky, self-reliant gamester. Somehow 
though, when he gave you his time, you felt it 
valuable. Grant was the same old master. We 
talked another night away in an old studio-loft. 

The next day was Saturday. My manuscript 
had been submitted, and I called upon a little 
coterie of students of the mystic in Lenox Avenue. 
They made me welcome- — rare young celibates 
who did material things well by day, and studied 
God at night. They had all been through the 
trainings of mind and body which had engrossed 
me to such length; and proceeded to advise me 

[205 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



strongly against the vegetable diet, even taking 
a blood-test and showing me the inertia of my 
present physical foundation. Hours were re- 
quired, but I was convinced. I even had, before 
I left, a suspicion as to the cause of the "headi- 
ness" of the romantic moments in the new Pelee 
novel. 

That night I dined in an Italian restaurant 
with Grant W., and Dickey B. Bars were down 
after seven months ; drink came in with the flesh- 
pots. Moments of that night contain some of 
the most remarkable physical sensations. The 
city was baking hot — wine and food and faces; 
old friends, Asiatic memories — the altogether 
new sound of the voices and laughter of women. 
. . . But I couldn't stay. They could never 
understand. It was slow, slow drinking for 
me. I knew that a deluge was coming and went 
out to meet it alone. Strange it was — I wanted 
them; I was happy with them, but could not 
stay. . . . Hours afterward I crawled in with 
Grant, but was away again before he was up — 
Sunday — down among the bars again — a day of 
terrific heat. Grant found me. He saw that 
it was different from the drinking in Asia. It 
seemed that my body couldn't stand this sudden 
reversal, in the midst of prostrating heat, but I 
afforded every chance for it to destroy itself. 
. . . The next morning, before being caught and 
blinded in the killing caravan, I went to the pub- 

[ 206] 



TRINITIES 



lishers. The book had been read over Sunday; 
the reader had reported unfavourably. 

I was in the street with the manuscript. They 
had asked to have it read again; they were not 
altogether decided, but I had demanded the 
manuscript. Dickey found me, asked to care for 
the story and submit it at my word to his pub- 
lisher. I refused, though I had no thought what 
to do, I wanted to breathe — could only endure 
those who could drink as I drank. ... I went to 
the Battery. The crocodile in the Aquarium 
fascinated me. I seemed to know him — seemed 
to know how r he lost his eye. Pictures, as from 
other lives, unfolded to frighten me. ... I 
would go and take drinks, and return to look 
at the crocodile. Once as I watched, his head 
turned slowly to the right. A cry escaped, so 
concentrated had I been. Such shocks of fright 
are only possible when one's consciousness is out 
of the body, ... I met some soldiers, and went 
with them, for hours drinking together. We had 
covered the same trails before. . . . The sub- 
way uptown at last: the air in the tube seemed 
dead; I fell asleep. The call of my stop 
aroused, and I hurried out. On the platform, 
my hands opened and shut, without the manu- 
script. The train was moving. 

That moment marked me. It was my only 
copy, save for the rough and incomplete first 
draft at home. I had the impulse psychically 

[207] 



MIDSTREAM 



to shatter the fact, and re-create the manuscript; 
to make an illusion of the loss, and truth of the 
mental restoration. But the validity of matter, 
and the impotence of such a will as mine, sunk 
deep — the sense of dependence upon bodily 
things. ... I could riot set in motion the usual 
methods of parcel recovery. I could not find 
any one; seemed to lack the face to tell any one. 
The story had the stain of first refusal upon it; 
but that did not spare me, since it brought back 
my primary failure as a workman. I wanted to 
go home, but had nothing to get there with, and 
nothing to take with me, but wreckage. . . . 
Late that afternoon, somewhere far uptown, I 
sat down under a tree to rest. A policeman 
rapped the soles of my shoes with a stick. One 
after another the hideous thoughts came back — 
that I had lost for a moment. 

I had five cents, saved to get downtown, but 
was so athirst that I could not spend the nickel 
for fare, and drank a glass of beer with it. 
Then I made for the mystic group. They were 
gathered under the lamp when I came. They 
cared for me, loaned me enough to get back to 
Detroit. . . . Within a month the manuscript 
was done over, and sold as a novelette. I was 
getting very well acquainted with Pelee and poor 
St. Pierre. 

Six or seven short stories came well after 
that — as if I had mastered something from the 

[208] 



TRINITIES 



novel and its misery. This series of tales was 
done, each in a week; each story was better than 
the one before. I dislike to confess it, but my 
work was better for the renewal of meat-eating; 
at least, the product of that state of growth, was 
better. The last of this series of stories was 
named tfke Mystic of the Wars— and was sold 
for what seemed a very high price to me. It 
comes to mind because it contained the germ of 
a later novel that changed my affairs. Pene- 
lope and the little girl and I — spent the winter 
in one of the Kentucky dry towns; and the next 
summer in a cottage on Lake Huron. Neither 
change cost any more than living in Detroit, but 
there was a saddle filly, which I had dared to buy 
in the bright drinkless days of the Kentucky win- 
ter. 

I made the journey back from the Lake to 
bring up this love of mine. A halt in Cincinnati 
on the down-journey had such a disordering effect 
that I fell to drinking. The return journey by 
freight, covering a week, was pure panhandling; 
tramps and whiskey all the way. Though it was 
late in May, the weather had turned bitter cold. 
One of the older roadsters was good to have for 
company. I recall his squirming into the straw 
for a nap, as a mother dog would do, placing 
the straw in handfuls across his knees; taking off 
his coat and drawing it over him for a cover. 
He said it was warmer so. 

[209] 



MIDSTREAM 



a You can trust, us old fellers/ 5 he said. 
"You're safe to go to sleep when I'm awake, but 
don't take any chances with the second-growths. 
Them kids' 11 knife a man for a few dimes." 

It was true. I was safe with the old man 
there — though a dozen passengers climbed in 
and out. It seemed almost incredible after that 
week — so long and dreadful was the exposure and 
degradation — that I should emerge suddenly into 
all that was light and pure. So was it always, 
coming home. ... I was now established as a 
periodical drunkard. Two or three times that 
summer, this weakness became strength, reaching, 
indeed, a self-destructive strength; which Pene- 
lope understood, watched and prevented. . . . 
Late that Fall, a little boy came to us. I walked 
the streets of that lake town, near the hospital, 
throughout the hours of the night. They told 
me that all was well. But I knew all was not 
well. I seemed to know this little boy; as if I 
owed him some great obligation and he had come 
to demand his own. I knew him as I knew my- 
self, and that we must work out our problem to- 
gether; that I could not give him anything until 
I was a man. I wondered if I should ever be 
a man. Not with my strength alone. I had 
tried that and failed. In two months more I 
would be thirty years old. All my life of evil 
had wronged the little boy. I had not been fit 
to be his father. I did not find any faith in my- 

[210] 



TRINITIES 



self nor any promise of strength, but prayed that 
the little boy would not have to go my roads. 

There was to be no drinking after I was thirty 
years old. As the period drew near, something 
prevailed upon me to make haste. One evening 
I went out saying I would be back at ten o'clock. 
Caught in the lower ways, the night and the next 
day passed. When I reached home again, Pene- 
lope said: "As good as your word." The 
clock was striking ten. ... I had to have 
morphine to get through the birthday reaction, 
but held good for several months. 

In the early summer I met R. W., a dear- 
hearted fellow who was promoting timber lands 
in the northwest. Girls loved him at once, for 
he was a joy-b ringer, a singer and humourist, 
who could quiver with three separate infatua- 
tions in a night, and sleep like a log until noon, 
forgetting a pleiad of appointments. I went to 
New York with him, when everything was down 
at home, and my thirtieth year concentration 
broken. . . . The experience was hard, but 
valuable. A sort of world-review was given me. 
We reached New York, with less than a dollar 
between us— took the town, from the same angle 
of nothing-to-lose. R. W. got into a coterie of 
capitalists and made himself felt at once; and I, 
(preyed upon by the fear of not being able to 
muster hotel expenses at the end of the week,) 
sold a story at the first strike. 

[211] 



MIDSTREAM 



For six weeks I saw the night-life, as it can 
only be bought. R. W. was in love with a fa- 
mous actress. Her big heart opened to his lavish 
offerings, and to his bosom companion. ... I 
left the hotel at the end of the first week, and 
took a little room in Forty-fourth Street. 
There I would write during the days — pure 
third-floor-back atmosphere — and emerge to the 
games of the gilded at night. 

The actress-lady went up to Hartford. R. W., 
his pockets creaking with hundred dollar bills, 
decided one mid-evening to see her that night, 
instead of the next day. The only way was by 
special-train, which he chartered. 

The days righted me. I think I was lost less 
than a fortnight in the illusions of the city's 
brightest. ... It was not worth working for — 
even to this thirsty one. The actress-lady's 
whole atmosphere was a sustaining adulation; she 
breathed in praise and plenty. Yet she was not 
rich nor happy. She saw that I saw 'this; 
thought I must be different, because I saw it; 
that I must be wise and good and worth while. 
I showed her it was not so. Another trinity — we 
went down to the Jersey shore on Sundays, played 
at being children — New York, the hideous school- 
room, behind — as if there could be a trinity here 
below. . . . She was brave and lonely and very 
sweet. I saw the stage through her, and her 
friends. 

[212] 



TRINITIES 



Also I saw that you can buy for one dollar on 
Eighth Avenue, what you pay ten for on Broad- 
way; that what the world called greatness in this 
woman was but a mummery, that her real great- 
ness was her passionate longing for reality. 
They have that vaguely on Eighth Avenue, too. 
I had it vaguely, 

R. W. was caught in the illusion. He would say 
that it was not so, but his conduct proved other- 
wise. Even with thousands, he could not bring 
the lady nearer. Yet he would not have thought 
of going to her without the crutch. . . . The 
city gives one strange but artificial strength. I 
moved and lived and worked — without sleep, 
kept up somehow, as I could not have done in the 
home-quiet. Once I broke out in white welts on 
my arms and breast. There was maddening 
prickle to them, that pulled out sweat from every 
pore. The two were frightened. R. W. was 
calling a physician, when an old Irish maid who 
served the lady, looked at my arms. 

"It comes from whiskey, shure," she said. "It 
goes with the same. Hould still and I'll rub 
some on, sorr." 

She was quite right. 

I sold a novelette for five hundred dollars dur- 
ing the last week. I shall always like A. L. S. 
who bought it. I had not expected it to go; in- 
deed, I am surprised now. My usual market 
for such things had refused it. I had determined 

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MIDSTREAM 



not to go home penniless this time. Here was 
the chance. The Trinity was breaking — but 
that is not my story. ... I did not go home 
penniless, but very worn ^nd done out, from what 
New York had given and taken. Penelope and 
the little girl stood by the gate in the station- — 
the same gate where my mother stood, straining 
to find her own, in the skeleton-soldier son. A 
year afterward R. W. was brought in there, ly- 
ing in a beautiful box of flowers. The City had 
taken what it could of the rest. 



[214] 



2 4 

UNDER-WORLD 



1 STOPPED to think one night, finding 
myself giving way to another novel at- 
tempt. It was a more serious matter 
than the writing. We were deeply in 
debt. There was no use trying to carry on any 
other work; only useless added strain in that. 

"It will take three months," I said to Pene- 
lope. "Everything will stop. A fine job for 
me, but you'll catch it hard down-stairs meeting 
those we owe. It will be a squeak to live 
through, but I've got a big story/' 

She might have said, "You always say that." 
She might have recalled the four or five former 
times in which I set out and put through a hope- 
less novel, only to fall farther behind the world. 
Instead she said: 

"Do your book." 

My saddle-horse was "half eaten up," at the 
boarding-stable, when the task began. I worked 
mainly in three sessions daily, riding an hour or 
so after the first one in the morning. Mid-way, 

[215] 



MIDSTREAM 



the thing went faster and faster. The second 
half of a book usually requires onethird the time 
of the first. I remember one midnight toward 
the end, starting in again for a run of two thou- 
sand words, fast and steadily as I could write, 
with hardly an edit afterward. Mainly a happy 
time for me, but there was a continual haste and 
tension to finish, that drained as much as the 
story. Work that a man loves never kills; it is 
excessive stimulation or outside worries that wear 
the worker down. Deep replenishment comes 
with pure work; one enters, one after the other, 
into different planes of power. The brain and 
body become trained and plastic to the rush of 
the output. There is a second wind, and a third 
wind. I have done a day's work often toward 
the end of a long task, that would have brought 
me to the craze of fatigue in the beginning. 
There is always a moment in a story for me, 
when the thinking ends, and the thing finishes it- 
self; and always a difference of outside opinion 
as to which part is better. A longer and more 
intense training is required to produce in this 
trance of expression; yet, it is my conviction that 
in such work alone is the cohering line preserved. 
The mornings are dear to me in which I rise 
from the machine to find six or seven pages of 
copy beside it — left almost like a gift upon the 
doorstep — the substance of which is almost as 
new to me when I read it another time, as the 

[216] 



UNDER- WORLD 



work of another man. According to my in- 
ability to remember certain portions of copy, 
more often than not, are their value. The pages 
that stand to the end, uncut and uncorrected, — 
are those which seem scarcely to have touched 
memory, and which came without conscious 
brain-eifort. I used to say that I had to be just 
so tired in order to do the best work, meaning 
that I had to be "worn thin" to be sensitive 
enough. We are not important while the body 
keeps the brain glowing with rush-messages of 
desire; we have not reached pure expression 
while the intellect imperiously dictates method 
and conduct. 

There was an old priest who served men in 
Siberia. Around him in that bleak winter land, 
were the best and worst of the Russian empire. 
He tended the sick, and prayed with them; 
brought food, cut wood, procured medicines, 
watched with the dying, prepared the dead. A 
certain young Red came out to the colony and ob- 
served the priest's manner of life. 

"Father," he said finally, "I should think you 
would lose your soul in the midst of such misery 
and evil and darkness — as our life here is made 
of." 

The old man leaned back and looked at the 
ceiling, shutting his eyes. 

"Weil now, that's queer," he said presently, 
"I had almost forgotten that I had a soul." 

[217] 



MIDSTREAM 



He was a living soul. . . . We are not con- 
scious of what we are, but of what we are not; of 
what we wish to be. That which we are, we 
perform, we breathe, and show others. Through 
service, the priest had made the transfer of con- 
sciousness from the mortal to the immortal, and 
in the purity of his giving, he did not realise 
that he was not as other men. 

Just as we take a better picture when we have 
forgotten the photographer; just as we make the 
deepest impression upon our friends in moments 
of selflessness, so are we at our best, when held 
in rapt expression of the greater life within. 

I touched only the threshold of such hours, in 
the doing of this particular long story. I wanted 
the personal hall-mark upon every page; I went 
after strength consciously; I had an eye to the 
market. I drank nothing during this work, but 
much coffee and smoked prodigiously. It was 
these, and the worry, not the work, that wore me 
down to pallor and thinness and treacherous 
nerves. 

Very often Peneiope talked to one creditor at 
the back-door while, at the front, ringing im- 
patiently another stood. One time I went down- 
stairs to find her explaining to a Scotchman why 
it would do harm, and no possible good, if he 
should turn off the gas. I was three months be- 
hind on the rent; the desk at which I worked was 
taken away. . . . R. who helped me with the 

[218] 



UNDER-WORLD 



copying in the evenings didn't expect anything 
for the present, Everywhere Penelope was con- 
summate. 

I said toward the end, "Either I'm crazy, or 
I've got a big thing." There was no doubt about 
the "bigness" when I was at work; but away — 
I was afraid. I sent it to a publishing house that 
I knew could not handle it as advantageously as 
others- — but because there was a surer accept- 
ance. . . . The fact is, I was very tightly drawn. 
I could not have withstood a refusal; something 
would have broken. There wasn't another book 
or story in me when I finished. Only one thing 
could set rne right; that was the answer I had 
concentrated on for thirteen years. 

The public I feared less than the publisher. I 
was willing to let the book go under a handicap ; 
expected nothing in review, but I did sense that 
the public would give me the answer. It was a 
ten years' book. It had the best moments of 
field, failure, emotionalism, and my knowledge of 
what was what in fiction. It is true that I had 
reversed on war; that my hero saw war as I saw 
it now, not as I had seen it in the field; yet I had 
no thought of writing other than a man's book. 

All that I felt about this book, I had felt be- 
fore and failed with; still I was very weak not 
to dare to take a higher chance. The same weak- 
ness made me whimper to Penelope ten days 
afterward, when I was nearly dead from drink: 

[219] 




MIDSTREAM 



c Tve done all I can in the game. I am done. 
It will help the book, if I go out. The book 
will take care of you." 

I did not want to hear that I should ever do 
better work. ... I did not know then so well 
as now, that even without the hideous excitation 
of alcohol, a sudden stopping of high-pressure 
work is dangerous to body and brain. I was 
nearly blind when the answer came — in three 
close-lined pages. I held them to me, and drew 
from the thick quantity of writing that the book 
was wanted. That was all I could see or endure 
then. I took the pages to the back-room of a 
saloon and sat hours. There was one bad spot, 
it was said; and an enumeration of smaller 
changes suggested. But over it all was the sense 
that came to me that the literary office saw a big 
book, rather well-done. The manuscript came 
back for corrections. I placed it in the saloon 
safe, until I could get sufficiently organised to do 
the final work. There were three or four days in 
which whiskey showed me new lengths of cruelty, 
its mastery established. Always at a certain 
stage, the crocodile was with me. 

The emendations and re-write were done in a 
day — one wobbly, weaving, weak-minded day — 
then I sank again. It was now May. I had 
written every moment toward fall publication, 
but was told that the book could not be brought 
out until early spring. I fought shriekingly at 

[220] 



UNDER-WORLD 



this, but it did not avail. My contract was 
signed, and acceptance of the poorest possible 
terms made, as a matter of course in a first book. 
' Two months elapsed before I emerged from this 
next to last pit. Doctors, friends and all who 
knew, declared I could never live through an- 
other. 

The saddle-horse had been sold for feed bill; 
everything was down, and Penelope ill. From 
July to November, I worked upstream on the 
short stories, but broke again, at the coming of 
another little boy. . . . One day I fell, walking 
down-stairs — the lurch of an overtested heart. 
. . . There was utter demoralisation of body, 
mind and spirit. ... I would rouse, not from 
sleep, but from some treacherous cessation of con- 
sciousness to find the crocodile in the bed with 
me, anywhere,— his dank muddy smell in my nos- 
trils. All the cruelties of my life passed in re- 
view — to child, animal, self; all the shames, all 
character-less actions and off-key utterances. I 
was in the senses, a-sway in the senses, a helpless 
victim of the forces that surround the sensualist. 
I learned the different planes of desire — the real 
under-world which is out of the body. I drank 
night and day; expected death momentarily; 
drank when my heart throbbed, shaking the place 
where I lay, as a ship when the seas sink from 
the screws; drank when my heart was so weak 
that I could not feel its life; drank when I could 

[221] 



MIDSTREAM 



not retain the drink, but gained strength from it, 
through repeated swallowings. I was a lie in 
every thought; every atom of individual stamina 
which colours a man's utterance and makes him 
of the slightest value, was deadened. I was not 
only afraid of locomotor ataxia, but believed that 
it had come. 

This campaign has also been written. I 
brought a fiction character through these stages, 
from the beginning, when work dropped from him, 
into and through one of the nights such as I 
passed. I was closer to it than now; to all the 
low motions of dissolution and body-preying. 
Only a few need such a narrative, perhaps ; I felt 
that it must be done, for I had earned the au- 
thority. There is this difference: that which to 
the story-figure was one climacteric night or hor- 
ror — was mine through fifty nights. 

This I know: Had I died in one of those 
nights, there would hardly have been a change in 
my condition of consciousness, until the realisa- 
tion that I lacked a vehicle to express and satisfy 
the desires, of which I was almost entirely com- 
posed. Instead, then, of being a body obsessed 
with evil forces, I should have become one of the 
evil forces seeking to satisfy my desires through 
the besotted flesh of others. 

However, this is not a lasting condition — no 
hell is, because hell does not deal with our im- 
mortal parts. Nature rids herself of these un- 

[ 222 ] 



UNDER-WORLD 



clean and destructive forces in due time, just as a 
spadeful of putrid matter is cleansed by the 
earth. Very clearly it appears to me, that such a 
dynamo of desire, denied a body, would finally 
cease to be, through natural disintegrating proc- 
esses. Of course, the primal instinct of such a 
desire-galvanism would be toward identifying it- 
self with another body, but this could only come 
to pass through a corresponding element of deg- 
radation in the human mating that would give 
it birth. 

The establishment of order and aspiration in 
the human relations of men and women would 
result in the clean-up of the under-world. 

The final question comes : What would be the 
result of a life that ended under such low condi- 
tions? Call it a bad pearl on the string, but one 
bound to fall awajf in due time because of its 
flaws. Certainly the real life-line has come too 
far, too long, to suffer extinction through a few 
years of failure and perversity. Still there is a 
tragedy about it. It would all have to be done 
again, without a renewal of power. We are 
here to strengthen the line — finally to fix an im- 
mortal identity. That is the unparalleled trans- 
action, and any delay is tragic. A necklace of 
pearls — and one at last to be a jewel, not of re- 
flected, but of intrinsic light. 

It was good G. W. and his lady who came 
finally to our house and told Penelope what to 

[223] 



MIDSTREAM 



do. My mother borrowed money on the lower 
Lincoln property, and I was taken away to the 
cure. I remember demanding that the manager 
of the sanatorium assure me again and again that 
the treatment would not "affect the brain/' 
Finally he mildly asked, "What of months of 
whiskey-whipping night and day, in relation to 
the brain?" . . . It's all a blur. I dove down 
twenty-two brass-covered steps the first night, 
and broke the door at the bottom with my head. 
I was disappointed to "come to" . . . They be- 
gan to wrench me free. It was a fight. Not un- 
til the sixth day did they take the whiskey away. 
I think I meant to fool the doctor, when he gave 
me my last drink, but I didn't. That was four 
years ago from this day's work. I had a hun- 
dred and twenty needle-punctures in my arm 
when I left, beginning to be a man again. 
There was another glad homecoming (as if I 
brought back the treasures of the Indies) from 
my mother and Penelope and the little ones. I 
had hardly seen that new little boy. . . . A 
month later the novel appeared. 



[ 224 ] 



25 

MARKET PLACE 



— ®- 



I WENT through the book hurriedly, in the 
fear of finding some error that would 
spoil it at the last. It was not spoiled, 
but as I left it; the emendations of that 
pitiful day stood up strangely well. Boy was 
strongly in it — but something of the best of the 
ten years. I was glad to finish reading; have not 
read it since, 

I expected nothing critically, very little pres- 
tige from my publishers; but my heart listened 
for some vague indefinite answer from the pub- 
lic. In the earl y reviews I looked for scorn; my 
eyes so expectant of scorn, that I seemed to find 
it in the easy lines of praise. Drilled to defeat, 
I could not think of any critic, or one connected 
editorially in any way, liking the work. I held 
fast against the first fine liking. "I have not my 
right mind," I suspicioned. "This is a con- 
spiracy. The sanatorium has hurt me." I 
studied the faces of people who looked at me. 
More and more came in — high ungrudging 

[ 225 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



words — the critical result no longer tentative, a 
result that could not be transposed into sinister 
meaning; finally an envelope of really important 
reviews — from periodicals that I expected at 
best, but a scornful or patronising line; then the 
quantity, ringing the one good promising note — 
scores and scores of columns. 

This was the drink from the world that I had 
thirsted for from the beginning. The matter of 
sales was a small sordid thing compared. From 
March to July, the book never moved in the 
stores; and then Edwin Markham's recommenda- 
tion of it for the Nobel prize, stirred it into a 
thing of sales. By Christmas, there had been 
eight editions, and I had a book of importance to 
the trade. 

This is the point: I was detached' from the 
story before it was published. I felt that the 
critics, even though they had saved my life, were 
very generous. Yet had it failed, it seems now 
that I must have softened to the markets; that 
I should have been forced to retain my publisher 
by writing for markets, instead of for myself. 

I was doing another book, of course, straining 
as never before ; having refused outright to do an- 
other war-book. I worked in deep humility; so 
deep that there was perhaps a strain about that. 
I was not quite well, but felt I was never so 
strong as in this writing. I rode downtown 
with Dr. McK. in one of the winter days of the 

[ 226 ] 



MARKET PLACE 



second' book's finishing, seven or eight months 
after the sanatorium. He inquired about the 
periods in which the thought of drink came 
back. 

"But they don't, 5 ' I said. 

He was silent, a bit sceptical about the gold- 
cure's efficacy. 

"You must have been ready to stop." 

"I was ready long before — but lost the sense 
of the advantage. I mean it all looked differ- 
ent when that whisky tension came." 

"Don't you have that tension now?" 

"No." 

"Do you mean- that you haven't had a fight, 
since you came home?" 

"Exactly that." 

He was* a wise good man, so that I dared say 
what was in my mind. Yet I spoke hesitatingly, 
with a sense of the delicacy of the thing : 

"Doctor, I think when a man stops and his 
real self comes back with restored confidence, 
there is a certain spiritual replenishment. I have 
never thought of asking to be perfectly well 
physically again, but I think my head is all right. 
I have had days of work in the last month that 
seem to make me sure of that — " 

He saw the happiness, and understood that it 
had not been easy for me to tell him. 

"You think you are at your best now. In 
three or four years you will begin to know what 

[ 227 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



real replenishment means. You'll be all right 
physically, too. 55 

A gust of joy came from the words. We had 
stopped before his downtown office. He liked 
the novel and spoke of it now. I knew what he 
was thinking, and laughed as I said: 

"You think the book gave me something that 
took the place of alcohol, don't you? 55 

"Yes, strong medicine for any head. 55 

"Don't you think I 5 11 get up the hill with it?" 

I can't recall his answer. 

In the second book, I put the drink chapter, 
and many other things which I did not then 
know so well. It was done in the din of the 
first; literally my answer to the many who said: 
"You'll never do another book so good as that." 
This angered me, possibly gave me a bit of toppi- 
ness which said, "I'll show 'em." Yet in my 
work, I was thankful and ardent. I wanted 
many things — to do a thousand times better, to 
do a novel such as no man ever did, but it was 
not the same old burning. 

I brought war in from the field to a man's heart 
— war, such as I knew from myself. Far finer 
workmanship is required to portray the fight of 
a man to be decent, or the progress of a man com- 
ing in to his vision, than that required for the 
rudimentary games of the open. We are given 
devils as we go, and those are very common and 
unevolved devils, which require only muscle, 

[228] 



MARKET PLACE 



metal and wrist to overcome. That is the boy's 
part; war. a boy's game, but the devils which test 
and train men 5 are more worthy of fighting and 
reporting. 

I was too close to reality. I tried to employ 
all the colour that one might use in handling a 
fifty mile battle-front in this fight of the animal 
and angel in man. I found that the people who 
could regard with calm appreciation the blood 
and the shame and the suffering of remote battle- 
lines, could not look upon the ape and the tiger 
and the parrot in their own natures. I had 
found here in America a sex-conflict of 
deeper significance than any foreign conflict 
of armed men; at the same time, I found 
that the training of a war-writer was not pure 
training for this subject. I brought realism, 
and not the mellowing of insight to the down- 
pull of desire, and the lifting force of spirit. 

A man is not more poised amid the hatreds of 
reaction, than in the destructiveness of the evil it- 
self. The reformer, lately reformed, can never 
touch but a certain grade of consciousness. To 
those who have found themselves, he is often as 
obscene as the chaos. My second book was a 
very important failure. In spite of long years 
at the anvil, I needed consummately just what I 
got — a thorough "panning" from most of the 
critics who counted. The small disagreement 
did not blind me at all. Had it not been for 

[229] 



MIDSTREAM 



the first, there would have been no immediate 
demand for the second. 

I did some intense living in those weeks. It 
seems I brought into this life something excep- 
tionally crude. You may have seen it long ago, 
but it is something for me to suspicion it now, 
since it is intrinsic. Recently I found a start- 
lingly deep bit of criticism of a later book, by 
H. V. D. in a Denver paper : 

"It is the instinct of the serf that grips this 
hero. He is an under-dog that has thrust his 
muzzle up into the clearer atmosphere of the 
world. The earmark of class is still strong upon 
him, however; his instincts are servile." 

I believe H. V. D. has touched life. This may 
have been half the reality of the shames of my 
early years; and at the bottom of my need for 
long and severe grinding in order to get any- 
where. 

It was a certain power that I burned with, but 
raw power; and it met rebuke that it deserved. 
Had I possessed the fineness which I have ad- 
mired in many men and women, whose lives have 
passed in house and garden comparatively, I 
would have clipped that second book to the bone 
before turning it loose. Yet in justice I cannot 
but say, that much of the fineness of men is a 
trained world-surface. Shut a man in a room 
with pencil and white paper to learn what he is. 

I fought it out and found my place in the 

[ 230 ] 



MARKET PLACE 



world again. This was a valuable period, for 
the hour was reached when I could say: A 
most important thing for a writer to learn is that 
he has no concern with praise; and no concern 
with blame, except when it comes from an insight 
superior or comparable with his own; that a man 
loses his critical faculty in a book, unless that 
faculty is of characteristic development; finally 
that it is good to take a beating in the market- 
place, for something not learned at home. 

I added to all this in time, that a writer's busi- 
ness is with his manuscript, and not with 
the mechanically multiplied product; that when 
something said about the latter hurts, it is be- 
cause there is a lesson to be learned — just as a 
weak muscle reveals itself in pain at the end of 
a strong exertion of the body. ... In a word, I 
drew from the first book a certain aliment that I 
was dying for—strong, against nature, deadly if 
the vitality of man does not supply quick tolera- 
tion, but essential at that itme. The second, and 
its critical rebuke — together with the years of 
weathering and the good days that had come — 
set me right to begin again. It could not have 
been designed better. 

My mother's vitality was being marvellously 
renewed. I think she was as happy in the first 
answer as I. Penelope was happy in the bright- 
ened house. To her there was no astonishment. 
This answer had been deserved for years, in her 

[231 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



view. The world had been stupid not to give it 
before. Indeed, she had said as much to a pity- 
ing neighbour on one of the darkest nights of our 
lives. She wore the author-business as lightly as 
the littlest bov. 



[ 232 ] 



26 

FICTION-MIND 



IN my early publishing relations I found 
that certain illusions must die; in fact, I 
met the actual substance of trade. liar- 
rowings resulted, but structural experience 
as well. The lives of these men were not my 
life; it was difficult for us to understand each 
other. We talked slowly and carefully — as in 
an uncertain language— returning hastily to near 
and sensible objects to make thoughts clear; I 
realised plainly at length that men w r ho multiply 
a product by machinery must get their joy of 
living, if they can, outside of their work; and 
that I, at my best at home in the study, did not 
belong to these methods and manners. There 
are natural publishers, as well as writers by na- 
ture, but I merely met the business at first. 
Often when I failed utterly to touch their point 
of view, I thought of O. C. and the Shipbuilder 
who wanted his speech reported in his own pa- 
per. I observed that we were on the opposite 
sides of the mountain. I confess at first, the 

[233] 



MIDSTREAM 



stamina of standing alone went from me; the 
something, thought to be unwhippable, went out 
of my soul. 

One night I went over to New York for din- 
ner. In an artists' club, I met a lady. She had 
dined, but sat down at the table with me. That 
was at eight. At midnight we were still talk- 
ing raptly there, the four hours untimed. She 
seemed Art and New York, and all that I was 
ready to know. Slightly older, of rare loveli- 
ness, she had that purity which came from her 
own nice balances of things, not from morals laid 
down. I hadn't realised the need of this meet- 
ing; yet in truth, I was like an empty wharf and 
she a fleet of ships coming home. 

In earlier stages of workmanship, the man 
must find his types abroad. Those nearby, pur- 
sue their significant ways, unnoted. I had de- 
manded battle-lines to challenge the youthful 
zeal; and here abroad in a foreign atmosphere, I 
felt suddenly empowered with the animation of 
the world's women. ... I had not sought it; 
did not know how weary I was of men who had 
tramped and shouted so long over my conscious- 
ness. 

I think of her now with the white phlox. One 
winter day afterward, on the way to her studio, 
I found a few tall new-flowered branches of 
Charlotte Saisson and brought them with me. 
We had tea and she placed them in a tall vase — 

[234] 



FICTION-MIND 



the table by a southern window — and sat op- 
posite, very vivid in the grey light. To her, 
flowers were profound emotions. Once I told 
her of some matters of this story that had not 
occurred in words before. 

'That's the quality," she exclaimed suddenly. 
"Every little while I get just a touch of it from 
you — a leaf from the book that will never be — 
pure spiritual self -revelation. . . . No Ameri- 
can could detach himself enough to produce such 
a book. Yet, it would be very real and valu- 
able." 

I seemed to know what she meant always, re- 
ceiving a clear vision of the finished thing in her 
mind, and a thrill of eagerness to begin at 
once. . . . One day I went to her after a dismal 
session with the publishers. I had been offered 
a contract, calling for a book to be written "on 
the lines" of the first novel, and had penned 
across it: 

"I consider this immoral." 

Very good, but the fact is, I faced a year of 
pot-boilers for the energy. 

She listened, her face set. 

"Oh, I know — I know," she said. "Do you 
think I haven't met such things?" She showed 
me work she had to do between time. "We all 
have to truckle. Most of us get too tired to fight 



on." 



That day, all fear and irritation left me. 

[235] 



MIDSTREAM 



R. M. Bucke's book was in her studio. She had 
just been reading, and told me hastily of the 
spiritual adventures many memorable men have 
met in their thirties, as recorded in this book. 
Then and there as she talked, my third novel 
came to me — the hero, his mother, the woman he 
found finally, his friends and the world. 

I shall speak of this book as Bedient, not refer- 
ring to the book itself, but to the important period 
it represents in my production. Many realisa- 
tions are grouped about this character, and are 
identified with that stolen year of freedom in 
which the work was written. Of course there is 
great joy in the moment of conception like this. 
I felt very cheap because a company of manu- 
facturers had been powerful enough to depress 
me. The phlox lady saw that I was made over 
new once more; that the workman had been re- 
leased from prison and given his shop again. 
But she did not listen steadily when I praised 
her. 

c Tm a road-side cup. I am glad the traveller 
is refreshed. . . . Come again when the great 
task is done." 

Her glow was upon all her friends whom I 
met. I saw, through her, the wonderful quality 
of the modern woman who refuses man as he is; 
who holds to the ideal and turns her energies, de- 
nied motherhood, into the service of other 
women's children. . . . Personally she loved 

[ 236 ] 



FICTION-MIND 



beauty more than service; personally she would 
have preferred children of her own, to the vision 
which gave her such deep scorn for the things 
as they are* She saw none of the resplendency 
in the nuns of the world which so thrilled me — 
because she was one of them-— a cup to refresh 
the traveller, reminding him of his work when 
he would tarry, a passionate mother of the for- 
lorn. . . . Sometime I mean to take my little girl 
to her, and leave her for a time. 

The happiest summer I had ever known now 
began. I had used every bit of surplus to pay old 
debts; the little that came, we managed to make 
enough. When it waxed too hot for work 
in my attic study, I took a little house in the 
fields— a five-mile ride from the city. I never 
could keep out of the saddle, and this brought 
a utility to exercise that made it doubly enjoy- 
able. The morning rides over the country roads, 
the illusion of the book's reality as it grew (and 
there is always such an illusion) ; sunlight, rain 
and daily roadside changes; happiness at home, 
the occasional buoyancy of old-time health; and 
over all the absolute disregard of market, pub- 
lisher and critic in relation to the work at 
hand — these, and the adorable quality of the 
quiet air, made of that summer's work a memo- 
rable adventure. 

I came at times very close to the oneness of 
[237] 



MIDSTREAM 



life and task; I achieved leisure which is out of 
the question in a city study; there was a contin- 
ual gladness in the ease and length of hours — 
until my horse began to nicker for dinner. Oc- 
casionally I went back in the afternoon. Often 
I thought of Penelope and the children and my 
mother, from this little distance. Often I saw 
meanings of the day before, in the quiet of the 
Field-house. There was time for everything. 
Often I let an hour run by in thinking; the strain 
of the whole life relaxed. I put much that I 
perceived and aspired to, in the day's work upon 
the character of Bedient^ for this was a book done 
to please myself, but there were many by-prod- 
ucts. During this summer, my first real insight 
into the character of the fiction-mind appeared. 

Beware of .what you want with a hard and 
steady passion. You will likely get it, and then 
you will learn whether it is good or not. As a 
boy and young man, I wanted the fiction-mind. 
I was willing to sacrifice all pleasantness and sim- 
plicity to attain it. The story-teller with his 
pack pleased me in ideal — the man who made his 
creatures, and who called the blessings of a tired 
world upon himself, for entertainment fur- 
nished. 

I had laboured and concentrated and produced 
long and faithfully toward the end of achieving 
the fiction-mind. Something striven for with 
this energy, does not die more easily than it 

[ 238 ] 



FICTION-MIND 

comes. Was it a good thing — this that ambition 
had made me? 

I regarded it. I saw in many men, not what 
they were, but what I wanted them to be. They 
were more interesting to me, as I saw them with 
the fiction-mind. I wove in and around . and 
through them, something that was not theirs. 
When I thought of them, they came partly in 
my garments. All events that ran through my 
mind, used a path of my own making, not of 
truth, not of fabrication exactly, but a path be- 
tween the two, of fiction-formation. 

I, as a man, was not clear of it. I could acquit 
myself of no decent performance for another, 
without seeing myself in the action, and perceiv- 
ing myself as a literary possibility. I could not 
utter a cheerful sentence without the sense of lis- 
tening to it, nor meet a fellow-spirit without tak- 
ing away, reconstructing, or at least disordering 
the conception, because of this literary possibility. 
I could not kneel down to pray without the con- 
sciousness of this third eye, this damnable literary 
busybody, examining the posture or commending 
the purpose. 

When one gives, or loves, or prays self-con- 
sciously there is an abomination upon the out- 
pouring. I began to perceive the haunt of the 
artistic, my slavery to effects. Sincerity was not 
in this consciousness ; nor simplicity. Purity was 
a stranger to it. It was fiction, indeed. 

[239] 



MIDSTREAM 



A man's character is the hill rock. No one 
will quarrel with that. We build character 
by being true to ourselves; — blessings upon the 
head of V. O. B. — by ceasing to lie to ourselves. 
The whole truth to others is simple, compared 
to the integrity of self. The constructive and 
enduring quality of a man's work depends upon 
his character. All fancied subtleties and studied 
effects are of the charlatan and the mountebank. 
We know the lie of the thing we try to force 
across. 

Rely upon it, there is no excuse for being, 
other than an expression of life as we see it. 
There is nothing more sorrowful nor unlovely, 
than playing a part. Even sickness of the body 
comes from it. A man commits moral discord 
when he bends his back to catch the acclaim of 
the gallery. A man's business is to express him- 
self. 

So I had paid a price in attaining the fiction 
mind, such as it was. There was much to tear 
down. I saw that the meaning of all work, was 
to build the structure of man; that the work itself 
was but a scaffolding; that any fancied appeal to 
others is a lie to the self. 

This was good; the past was all right that en- 
abled me to come to this point; all good — 
swamp, mesa, tundra and height. I saw that 
there was a grand clarity to attain, not the inland 
lake clarity of simple consciousness such as the 

[240] 



FICTION-MIND 

peasant has, but the oceanic clarity of seership. 
I saw a man may move through the dark swiftly, 
past every pitfall, when he rises to meet all things 
face to face, and gives himself, unlying, unafraid. 
I understood at last that the sanction of friends, 
the love of women and the smile of the divine 
ones, comes in answer to this integrity. 

Those were clearing days of quiet in the Field- 
house, Pent air seemed to blow out of mind; 
freshness came in with the stillness. I was two 
years away from the sanatorium, but it seemed to 
me much farther. I was grateful to the source 
and scheme of things, and caught the first actual 
glimpse of what I seemed really meant to do — to 
show the breaking forth of the self-man into the 
world-man. Ahead on the road are the world- 
men — how that sentence rang. It was incandes- 
cent to my mind. 

We are strangely identified with the things 
which prevail as most important for us to accom- 
plish. Bedient was my first conscious attempt to 
portray the passage from self to service; yet 
when I surveyed past work I found that the same 
was expressed everywhere. The ideal of the old 
Siberian priest, serving blindly, without knowing 
it, and all the time, was evidently deeper than 
brain. 

Of course it is much better to serve men in 
this way than to talk about it; but the fact is, 
we become rhythmic with such grandeur here in 

[241] 



MIDSTREAM 



the flesh, first through a mental conception of its 
lofty quality, and then through long aspiration. 
It is human to talk by the way. 

I remembered now the travels with my grand- 
father, and the deep effect upon me of the so- 
called "conversions" of the men and women of 
the fields, to whom he preached. I felt the con- 
tagion as a child, yet could never quite reach 
abandonment. There was something resplendent 
about those flashes in the pan, after all; even 
though scandals followed the loving of one an- 
other. We called it fanaticism — those first fires 
which made the simple folk cry aloud that they 
were sanctified. Yet they have their place in the 
simpler consciousness; they are suggestions on the 
plane of the physical emotions, of what has come 
to saints and workmen of the past, who have at- 
tained the upland slopes of the spirit; indeed, it 
has come to all the great productive servers of 
men. That which is but a fusing of emotions in 
simple consciousness, often to the scorn of the 
world, is an inkling, nevertheless, of the splendid 
fusing of the mortal and immortal in man, which 
the bo-tree symbolises and the descent of the 
dove, and the road to Damascus. 

All the progress of the individual is toward this 
liberation of consciousness; this transfer of the 
office of consciousness from the animal to the an- 
gel; the fusion in one being, of the divination of 
woman with the militancy of man; the union of 

T 242 ] 



FICTION-MIND 



spirit and flesh which means the end of self-con- 
sciousness and the beginning of world-con- 
sciousness; finally which means the glorious in- 
tegration of spiritual life that prompted the 
inspired Lao-tze to say to his people: "I shall 
be standing at the Gate until the last one has 
passed through!" and brings the same immortal 
significance to the words of Jesus: "Lo, I am 
with you always — even unto the end of the 
world." 

I saw that all men and women, after the stress 
and complication, should come to a place of peace 
like this Field-house which I had found. The 
end of the body will achieve it for a time in many 
cases, but it is needed in the body. The voice of 
the many is the voice of the devil. The real self 
is lost in the city, lost in the herds and hives of 
men. We reach a time when we must have this 
peace or die; we are allowed to wait too long. 

I was beginning to hear my real self there in 
the Field-house. Glad fulness was about. 
Those at home saw me happy and different. In- 
ner life was awake. The real self was finding 
expression, the instrument of it had begun to lis- 
ten. Men in the city cannot do that, for silence 
and solitude are needed. They hear each other. 
Their brains are jammed with sounds — other 
men's words, things heard, read or laboriously 
learned, heavy materials actually collected by the 
brain. No man is an individual until he begins 

[ 243 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



to express the real self. He's of the herd and 
hive. The entire richness and variety of his 
wretchedness is to whip him out of the hollows 
and vagueness of light. You can't hear the real 
self until you get the din of other people, and 
other people's truck, out of the brain. That's 
all there is to mastery — to achieve the stillness 
and listening; that's the ecstasy of the immortals. 
One clear sentence from the real self, and you 
are never the same afterward. You are an In- 
dividual. 

I would sit there in the doorway, and fall into 
a contemplation of the light — until sounds and 
the sunlit beauty were farther and farther, and I 
was at peace — all in fine rhythm with the world. 
... I knew that I lived — I knew that I was a 
living man; that I could stand alone. I knew 
that if I could hear exactly what the real self 
was saying — the product would be constructively 
new and unerringly right. 

It's all true, — what the prophets and saviours 
came to earth to tell men. We've each got 
powers undreamed of. I saw why I had suffered 
so, why I had hated so. It was because I had 
lived and moved in selfishness, in the blindness 
and fog of other lives. It is the herds that suf- 
fer and die in the dark. I had climbed a step 
above what I had been, so that I could see the 
squirming greeds and lusts. Nearly everything 

[244] 



FICTION-MIND 



I had ever done was a sort of random snatching 
or spiteful reprisal — the whole sorry business a 
leaning upon others. I began to see clearer what 
I should do to-morrow, how to do it well, quickly, 
painlessly to others. 

Many thoughts came to me like these : 

A man is clean alone, if he is clean at all. 

It isn't being a superman to learn to listen to 
the real self — just the beginnings of manhood 
proper. 

A man is either a constructor, or a slavish con- 
server of others' ideas. He doesn't know how 
great he is, until he has learned to listen. 

The mind of man is like a publishing house — 
presses pounding away with routine pamphlets, 
statistical hedgings and parliamentary junk — 
while a divine eternal poem is ready and waiting 
in type. 

The individual counts in this world; the in- 
dividual must be served. He does not remain 
long a machine's assistant; he does not continue 
to pluck fruits from a wheel. It is the individ- 
ual who has his way; who refuses to be wronged 
and trampled, and who chooses where and how 
he shall bring forth his kind. The individual is 
a man who hears himself. I don't mean a man- 
crusher; not a man who rises on the necks of other 
men. He doesn't hear a real self, but an ugly 
animal instinct. It is not a way of greed. The 

[245 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



pitch and depth of greed is back in the crowd; in- 
deed it can only exist where souls are grouped. 
This is a way of compassion. 

Three lines from Jacob Bohme stood out in my 
thinking. In the midst of his philosophy which 
went so high, he exclaimed, "It is not I who write 
these things. This that you see is but a simple- 
minded and foolish old man. These things are 
of the love of God." 

I learned well there in the Field-house that this 
"love of God" only comes to a man's soul, when 
love for his fellow man goes forth. ... It is a 
kind of prayer, this listening; a man must make 
good his fine thoughts with actions. It is power, 
a great gift, a receiving of creative force; its out- 
pouring is service to men. 

This is the substance of the matter: The real 
self will not associate with a man while he re- 
mains indecent. 



[246 ] 



2 7 

INSURRECTIONS 



THE Bedient manuscript had been read, 
before I followed on. I had been 
like a boy in a dream all the year; 
this was the awakening. Even the 
face of my friend at the advertising desk looked 
long and dour. "You must do a pure romance," 
he said. ... I went from desk to desk — presi- 
dent, vice-president, sales department, literary de- 
partment. It was all the same— a sort of "Let's 
forget the past—and you do a pure romance." 
I would say clearing my voice: 
"But what about the Bedient book?" 
At every desk my answer was a frightened 
look that seemed to say, "For God's sake, are you 
going to force me to speak?" 

The fact is, they didn't speak at once. I was 
falling— -falling— there was no end to the dis- 
tance down. I had an idea for a love episode, 
which though new and very fair to me, might be 
incorporated without hitting the nerves of the 
lazy-minded. I arranged to do this and left. 

[247] 



MIDSTREAM 



By mail came to me the report on the Bedient 
book. The main criticism from the publisher 
was that Bedient was ' 'illegitimate.' * 

The word is theirs. 

One sentence of the letter was this: 

"You may perhaps have overlooked the fact 
that we are endeavouring to guard you against 
criticism." 

I thought of the man from the literary depart- 
ment being called on a matter of mine to the head 
office while I sat there — the man who had told 
me so many times what to write next and how 
to do it — and how he stood now in that room — 
rocking on his toes, sweating, embarrassed, his 
whole face and manner an apology for the space 
he used and the air he breathed in that presiden- 
tial place. And he would spare me from criti- 
cism. 

Finally, I thought of Bedienfs mother, of her 
baby, of the shame of children incident to, and 
punishment for, debauched sexual appetites — the 
marriage of it — the male idea of it — the whole 
sorry jungle business — and that this, and its word 
"illegitimate" — should rise to guard me from 
criticism. 

It was hard to get humour working for a day 
or two. 

This is the old agony of the producer meeting 
the manufacturer. The latter gets the product 
first. His opinion hurts because it is the first, 

[248] 



INSURRECTIONS 



because the workman is still hot with it, still 
psychically connected with his work. And then, 
it is so often the way of commerce to belittle a 
product before the contract is signed and to exalt 
it afterward. Bedient remained "illegitimate/ 5 

Now there was in Bedienfs handling, certain 
vagueness that came from imperfect thinking; 
and I confess to moments in which I fancied my- 
self writing for the elect. I should have failed 
for this impertinence, but it did not taint the 
whole effort. A man of my life, writing "for 
the elect," — there's a real touch. Buffeted about 
the planet as I had been — I who had heard the 
Russians sing, touched the yellow hand, and lain 
with the crocodile — I, of the hundred maimed 
homecomings, writing for the elect; forgetting the 
triumphant fact that the spirit of things must 
have matter to express through — at least, here, be- 
tween Venus and Mars. 

But there were better moments in which I tried 
to make of this book — one fluent solution of 
physical action, mental authority and spiritual 
insight. In fact, this formula was conceived in 
that writing, and remains as a novelistic ideal. 
I mean by this, to do my work — so that the man 
who runs may get his story; so that the mind 
which delights in intellectual emotions may draw 
his values; and from the same pages to supply 
a strong inner vitality, significant to one who 
brings to the reading a spiritual penetration. Of 

[249] 



M I D S T R E A M 



course, this is setting oneself a task. It is much 
simpler to be cryptic than parable-clear. Still I 
have the conviction that with clean-cut thinking 
in matter, one need sacrifice no dimension what- 
ever. It is not half so wonderful a thing to have 
a sizeable equipment as to be able to use it. 

My training is still far from complete to carry 
out this formula; but it becomes clearer and 
clearer that there is nothing worth reading, re- 
garding or listening to, in the world of finer ex- 
pression, that has not in it, the cohering-line, the 
visioning quality of the spirit. The workman 
must be first a spiritual consciousness, before his 
book or painting or symphony can live — for 
again, this consciousness is the immortal part of 
a man, as it is of a work. Moreover the work- 
man can not perceive the relation of his physical 
experiences, nor individualise his mental realisa- 
tions, until his consciousness is lifted above them. 
So much is established. All products, merely 
mental, are ineffectual as the squabbling of the 
Jews over the letter of past prophecy — while the 
living Christ walked in their streets. 

A splendid influence for this transition was the 
critical flayings of my friend B. K. He said I 
tried to show the kernel without the husk; that 
I lacked the niceness of seeing soul and body, too, 
and had neglected to furnish bodies for the activ- 
ities of my recent work. In the main, carolling 
from soul to soul is not good work, said B. K. 

[250] 



INSURRECTIONS 



Moreover he said such things very well, and in 
a most important booth of the marketplace. 

He was fine and right. The fact is, I was a bit 
weary at that time of the brute in man and 
woman. My early experiences had contacted so 
thoroughly the brute part of people- — the sweat 
and strain and strike of flesh; the eating, wear- 
ing, desiring human creature. It was not that I 
did not know this creature, so much as that he 
bored me. I said to B. K. : "Let others write of 
him, if they like, if they love him. I am tired of 
brutes. I love that inner thing in man and 
woman — that is not of pounds. I have had too 
much of the pounds, and have turned against 
them." 

This was a far fling in reaction, and as far 
from poise as the loss of self-control. B. K. 
flayed me with authority and grand good will. 
He helped me to lose weak ideas. He seemed 
to become a part of my own self-critical faculty. 

An upper room class of young men helped to 
clear me. This came about through another 
class, to which this book is inscribed, — men and 
women of Detroit, the gift of years, who fore- 
gather with me winter Thursday nights. They 
furnish a quality that would bring out the best 
anywhere. We are accustomed to leave the mon- 
orail at once, and stop to breathe for tea about 
eleven, having completed the cosmic circle under 
a yellow lamp. They finish an idea while I am 

[251 ] 



MIDSTREAM 



using words to brace it; they require but a touch of 
fabric, or a hint of design, to get it all. One of 
the women said to me : 

"This is very good for us, but you know war 
and drink, as you are beginning to know us. 
What you need now is a class of young men. I'll 
arrange it." 

I had to finish sentences for the young men; 
bring ideas down to straight terms, and weave 
evenly the threads of thought. I had something 
to give, when I did that. I realised that I had 
as much business to write for the elect, as to do 
articles on mercantile efficiency; that every groove 
in my brain, worn from thwarted desire, the burn 
of ambition, the grind of poverty and personal 
deviltries — would fail in their purpose, if I lost 
my sense of touch with the crowd. 

Before finally leaving this subject, I want to 
explain the temptation which comes to a man to 
work for the few. There is an ecstasy in the 
first view of one's unborn realisations; also there 
is a proportion of visionaries who love the mov- 
ing of a dream better than any concrete expres- 
sion. They will tell the rapt-eyed novice that 
his work is finished. It is easy for him to believe 
the sanction of another, when it fits exactly into 
his own state of growth. There are always dis- 
ciples for the visionary. They see him whole, 
because they complete him with their own per- 
ceptive vitality. They supply the matter for his 

[252 ] 



INSURRECTIONS 



figures of dream, but his world which he should 
be appealing to, does not know he lives. He 
fails to speak the language of men; the scorn of 
men does not become a whip to bring him down, 
because he is strong in the circle of his fancied 
elect. 

There comes a time when a man must see that 
discipleship is an evil in itself; that a man may 
incorporate his story where he can, but not his 
individuality in other minds ; for every man's in- 
dividuality is his own sacred treasure. 

It is well therefore for the workman to be 
alone, and to fail, if necessary, until he learns to 
put away his dearest appraisers; to check disci- 
pleship which weakens forming individuality; to 
make himself as nothing compared to what he 
has to say; and finally to give birth in flesh to 
his visions, in spite of those who love and praise 
him, saying that a fallen plume is the whole bird. 

The workman has not finished because he sees 
the form of the result in the fusing metal. It 
must be anvilled in concrete intelligence and 
cooled for handling. His own emotions have all 
been spent from his product by this time, but he 
has ceased to work for personal thrills. 

Many are the mystics who erected great gods, 
and failed to learn the first lesson of life: that 
spirit requires flesh to manifest, as man, and for 
man. The mystics dreamed marvellously, but 
only the greatest learned to write or paint well, 

[253] 



MIDSTREAM 



A writer must be a workman even in paradise. 
After the vision, he must come down and tell the 
story. Only having done that in the parlance 
of men — coherently, in the midst of men — has he 
earned the right to ascend, and disappear once 
more in the gleaming mists of Sinai. 

Bedient, though kept from failure by the few 
who did not like him less because flesh fell from 
his figure from time to time, represents to me but 
an approach to the larger purpose. I see clearly 
that my world-man must be a man of flesh; that 
my training was not for an appeal to visionaries, 
but to men. There is ecstasy in visions — that's 
the heaven of it — but there is poundage to con- 
sider. The old story of the death of Lawton is 
recalled, that failed through fever, yet used all 
emotions. 

The ecstasy of Columbus was at the first 
glimpse of the misty shore-line. Night fell upon 
his exaltation. It was a burnt-out old man who 
made the landing. Yet for us, the world, the 
landing is the immortal moment. His, the ec- 
stasy of the shore-line, but the kneeling, the kiss 
of earth, is the victory we celebrate. 

We have no right to the ecstasy of conception 
if we are unwilling to bear the pangs of nativity. 

I did a romance the next year, and considerable 
short work; accepted the period as one of tran- 
sition. A change in my business relations eased 

[ 254 ] 



INSURRECTIONS 



the struggle. There had been two days to wait 
before the new arrangement could be made. 
During this period, I had the sense of failure al- 
most as keen and deep, as when leaving the field 
before the battle of Liaoyang, for I had uncovered 
the money-disease in all its revolting nudity. At 
the sleepless end of the waiting, something said in 
my brain, not in thought, but actual words: 

"Calmness and cheer." 

The new publishing arrangement was quickly 
and pleasantly finished. I regarded this as a truce 
to Poverty. In fact, my old friend Poverty 
seemed to say to me in passing : 

"If you do well, you have seen the last of 
me. But you must continue to think the thoughts 
of a poor man. If you do not, all the contracts 
of men shall not prevent us from meeting again. 
It is an honour and a great good to be numbered 
among the poor men; to realise no thought of 
prodigality, apart from giving to others; to un- 
dertake no financial obligation except the briefest 
and most obvious, and to accept no sense of ma- 
terial well-being, until the last debt is paid." 

My adventures with certain magazines during 
this year are interesting and laughable. I heard 
of one publication changing hands. It was said 
to have become a financed ideal, and I sent 
a story there. The editors wrote: 

"We know that you have what we want, but 
frankly it is not your literary stories that will 

[255'] 



MIDSTREAM 



suit us, but your red-blooded stories of ac- 
tion." 

I did a story about a woman loving a man so 
well that she saw his work apart, and refused to 
make a domestic of him. The answer to this 
from a different market, was: 

"To be entirely frank, we feel that the problems 
involved are not of sufficiently wide appeal to 
warrant our using it." 

I began to look for that word "Frank." If 
you stop to think, you will find that a man may 
not be at his best when using it. , . . And always 
these letters were mitigated with a statement that 
the work was well done; and always I was sug- 
gested back to war things, to purely physical 
movements. 

I perceived that certain writers who began to ap- 
pear when I sold the first stories, were now writ- 
ing to order — and stuff they would have been 
ashamed of then. I read another letter: 

"There are many fine passages, but your action 
is nearly all internal, vital to a single ideal, the 
importance of which the great masses of readers 
will disallow. In all frankness, we are not per- 
mitted to judge of what is best to print, by the 
opinions of a few advanced spirits, however much 
we value such opinions. Personally I must be 
faithful to my own trust here." 

I could do the stuff that was wanted in many 
cases, but it would have been easier had I staid 

[ 256] 



INSURRECTIONS 



drunk. In many, not all, editorial offices, the pro- 
ducer is paid well and swiftly alone for that which 
is common ; in which plots are pictured, and all but 
greedy imagination put to death, the aim being 
a sort of motion picture competition. The gen- 
uine worker encounters two distinct battles which 
concern his actual bread- winning; his early wares 
are refused because of lack of equipment, and his 
maturer product becomes impossible, because he 
gives too much. I saw that it was not enough for 
me to get down to the parlance of men, but to 
leave all hope behind — not only possible intellec- 
tual authority — but, by all means, any spiritual 
insight; that only "frank" down-writing would 
do. 

An inquiry arose within myself as to how this 
aloofness had been reached. Many influences 
touched upon in this book suggest it, but there 
is one concrete peculiarity that occurred. In am- 
bition and financial stress, a hundred times, at 
least, in early years, I had set out to conform for 
a story or two. I knew what was wanted, or 
fancied I did, and set out to make it according 
to this specification. Somewhere in the midst of 
each tale, I would lose the purpose. Something 
within would become animate, take the bit, and 
run away with the rest of the story. To me, it 
was invariably better than the first part, which 
had to be made over in the same zest — resulting 
usually in a refused story. This runaway led me 

[257] 



MIDSTREAM 



to the blessedness of Field-house days — to the oc- 
casional trance of production. 

I glanced back at my training for work. For 
twenty-five years I had been writing, for I be- 
gan in the old house. The years upon years of 
reverses which I had known, would have sensi- 
tised or ruined the brain of a musk ox. ... I 
looked about. The world is wonderful, perpet- 
ually modern. Each man, scavenger or poet, 
holds stuff and to spare, for eternal epics. The 
fault is the workman's if he does not interpret 
them. I could see this now, but why? Because 
of the reverses. Every reverse had given me 
something; cinched some lesson to the brain-cells. 
Every failure was an added point of equipment, 
compounding upon the others. 

What was the value of all this sensitising? 
To supply a quick sympathy and understanding 
for men. 

I perceived that I had needed every reverse, 
every rejection, even in this late hour; that I 
could well afford to put from me every dribble 
of "success," better than a single one of the fail- 
ures; that I had needed reverses, as flesh needs 
bone; that reverses clear the fat from the brain; 
increase the mental circuits ; lend to the fibres that 
firm delicacy which alone can carry live hot emo- 
tions without blowing out, and big-voltage ideas 
swift and true to their appointed brightness of 
expression. 

[258] 



INSURRECTIONS 



Commerce and the temporal need blind a man; 
he conforms because they seem so huge and inevi- 
table. Writers conform just as soldiers and war 
correspondents conform to the great systems of 
war and imperialism. These huge obvious things 
are dragons by the way to test manhood. The 
stuff of death is in them. They are destined to 
pass, but the stuff of manhood shall not pass. 

The workman must either fight or conform. 
That is a matter of the force that drives him. If 
he has the endurance to take the beatings of a 
double-decade, gathering force all the way and 
faith in the human spirit, it is against nature for 
him to fail to be heard. His knuckle shall reach 
the bell, and his people respond and vibrate to 
the stroke. 



> 
[259] 



28 

WHITE BLOOM 



EVERY workman has his dream-girl. 
Mine had to do with the wonderful rock- 
ing-horse in lower Lincoln; she was the 
meaning of the House Opposite. . I 
remember bread and butter, upon which I had 
tailed to balance preserves of a drippy sort. It 
overflowed its banks upon— whatever you would 
call the garment of a male child of three or four 
I was speechless with distress, when she deftly ex- 
plained to the rulers of the house that it was not 
my fault, since it "failed off all itse'f." That 
was Imogen. 

She went away. A winter's afternoon, doc- 
tor's carriage before the house opposite, blue sign 
on her door— whispered tension among my peo- 
ple—an afternoon of shadowy indoors and early 
falling darkness, while I watched across the 
street— and the next morning, the white crepe 

The dream-girl did not really die. I remem- 
ber leading her captive home from school by long 
yellow braids— the tall white Florence. She van- 

[260] 



WHITE BLOOM 



ished in her house ; and days afterward the white 
crepe signalled. . . . There was Adelaide sitting 
just in front in school — long eyelids, yellow 
curls, squeaking slate, and always the same little 
perfume. Twenty-five years afterward in a 
street car, with three little children — and she 
didn't know me. And S., whom I kissed at seven 
and at twenty-one — to find she wasn't the dream- 
girl at all. 

Then the shutters were closed a long time. It 
is tragedy how the cycle ends in childhood; 
the angel vanishes, another spiral is begun, — en- 
ter the brute, for his man-handling. . . . Only 
in moments of great loneliness and defeat, did 
the goddess show herself in women of flesh. I 
thought of myself so much, gave so little. There 
was rapture of moments in Cincinnati in the 
warm-heartedness of Nell, as it was given to an- 
other city waif. . . . The woman of the straw- 
berries — I had almost forgotten that first won- 
derful night, before any words. By the thrill of 
remembering, there must have been something im- 
mortal in that Longworth Street Gertrude, from 
whom the daylight faces turned away. 

They have come and gone. Because of the 
white bloom about them, (which something within 
seemed to know) they are remembered — not for 
the world-creature that conforms and adjusts and 
placates. Neither have they anything to do with 
that dead self of wars and drink and desire, 

[261 ] 



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though they came then, and are not seen 
now. 

They are one's own. The hardest thing to 
learn is that each of us is identified only with a 
certain circle — small or great, according to the in- 
trinsic gift of life and our freedom of its expres- 
sion. We work for the great Abstraction — the 
world — yet when it is over, we have only found 
our own. 

One night I was telling a company of people 
what a fool business war is. In my heart I knew 
it was being told very badly. I could find no 
sanction. They were strangers, who wanted to 
hear of the glory of war. A woman whom I had 
never seen before that night, played marvellously 
before I talked, and afterward. Finally she came 
to me, whispering: 

"I think we are each trying to say the same 
thing." 

She had sensed the whole sorry business, and 
added : 

"We could be good comrades — just that — 
couldn't we?" 

An adult, unafraid — she was tried on that say- 
ing. She could kiss a fellow-workman, yet re- 
main pure stuff of comrades. She was great- 
hearted. 

There was another woman who stood looking 
over the water, and she said this, like a moan to 
me: "It is hard — one of the hardest things we 

[262] 



WHITE BLOOM 



have to learn — that we dare not be comrades with 
men." 

And another stood waiting for a car, and 
looked down, tapping her boot in the snow: "So 
many parents are proud — as if they had helped 
and chosen and given themselves to some great 
beauty — when their children come unwanted, 
come all weary and bewildered." She had no 
children. 

It isn't that men are not ready to see the 
greater things of women, but that life betrays 
them; the world hardens; systems that men have 
made darken the vision. Women cannot tell 
that which they are. Men must see, and men do 
not see, because life calls them constantly to con- 
tend with one another. They live in routine and 
different problems — and they bring this sordid 
training to the white presence of life. Men have 
demanded the body of women so long, that four 
parts of the world have strained to satisfy the 
demand. But the epoch of the great children — 
the superb realisation of parenthood — shall come 
to those alone who realise that the human body of 
itself is intolerable. This realisation is not for 
the coolness of age, when the body has lost its red 
beaming. It must come in the high tides of flesh- 
power — this vision to perceive that the physical 
vesture is but the purple background of a star. 

Women enter the very austerities of progress, 
whispering, "Especially, do I belong here." 

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A workman's dream-girl is made over and over 
again. Many have found mine too much of 
spirit, and too little a tea-pourer. Many have 
said to me — "Women want worldly things, just 
as men do — perhaps more/ 5 Life has not shown 
me this; all the life afield did not show me the 
courage which a myriad mothers use daily, nor the 
selflessness. 

The listening girl in the novel that precedes 
this book, is nearer the being I mean, than I have 
been able to do before. It may be that every one 
in whom I have seen that white bloom, in word or 
glance, gave me something for her. 

It is the loss of the love of self — that thrills 
me most in the world — that glows everywhere 
and animates the race, and which it has been my 
experience to find more often in women. 

Penelope could not have shown me the self- 
lessness which I mean, had it not been for the suf- 
fering years. The roadside cup of the white phlox 
lady was her gift from the hardness of the 
world. It is through suffering that we lose the 
love of self. We call it suffering, but there is 
a consciousness that comes from it that is price- 
less. We cannot become sensitive without suf- 
fering; and we cannot divine the truth unless we 
are sensitive. One has to reach an almost self- 
effacement to associate with fine ideas. There is 
always a murky place in the philosophy of a man 

[264] 



WHITE BLOOM 



who has not mastered himself. The way of this 
mastery is through suffering. 

Many women are natural mystics. They un- 
derstand the safety of service; that the outpour- 
ing heart is replenished with purity; that it is the 
in-breathing of self-service which catches the con- 
tagion. We imprison women here in the man-idea 
of things. They love blindly; they want to ac- 
cept. I sometimes think they accept so well, be- 
cause they have a clearer sense than we, that there 
is an eternity in which to come into one's own. 
We, as men, are handicapped, because we are 
taught by the world to .believe that the first and 
most effective way of reaching a woman's under- 
standing — is to show her our passion for her 
body. . . . There has never been a turning in my 
life, that the nearest women did not understand 
and welcome the new dimension, as if they had 
been waiting for it all the time. 

Yet the soul of woman dies if it may not some- 
time aspire. A periodic possession of devils on 
a man's part will not break the waiting quiescence 
of his woman, but the sordid routine of downtown 
methods will set her into screaming destruction at 
the last. 

A woman can wait — she is happy to wait; but 
there comes a time when the man must turn back 
to her; when he must find in her all that he saw 
at first, and the spiritual lustre of the years upon 

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her. Just a glimpse of that in a man's eyes, and 
all the rest is forgotten. 

Life does not flow to one sustained tempo. 
There are rousing allegros of battle, but there are 
also thrilling adagios of soul-yearning. There 
are moments of life so deep in significance that 
anything which might happen to the body is 
trivial. The rest is unreality. 

It came about that I permitted the listening 
girl in the recent novel to suffer very deeply, as the 
world goes. Many have not liked that, but it 
seemed high conquest — less for what she gave her 
hero, than for what she received. A voice an- 
swered her sacrifice. It was the same with the 
war-pictures. I could not have written all that 
fighting again, except as a setting to show the 
treachery and tragedy of the world with its blind- 
ing, crucifying ways — a setting for the Plough- 
man to emerge, a voice. . . . She found him after 
the battles, perceived that he must have silence. 
There is drama in silence, in standing alone, in 
learning to love men, though it is not yet epical 
enough for the many. . . . There is always si- 
lence before a resurrection. Often there is a 
woman by the tomb of the body — but another, or 
others, to kneel before the lustre of the risen man. 

I do not think there was ever enacted the drama 
of a man's resurrection to higher life, that there 
were not among the women at hand, one or more 
to acclaim the spiritual consciousness. Even the 

[266] 



WHITE BLOOM 



woman at the cistern could forget the flesh; and 
Beatrice, passing on, knew that the dream of her 
was a lovelier uplift than her arms and lips. 

I see on the page a little back . . . "and al- 
ways a woman to kneel before the lustre of the 
risen man." 

You may ask, "Why kneel?" 

I answer, "As a sculptor kneels in the finishing 
of a task." 

Is she bereft? Not unless a workman who 
has finished an immortal task is bereft. 

Only the woman who weeps by the tomb of 
the body is bereft. If her consciousness were not 
in the flesh, she would have heard the angel say- 
ing, "He is not here. He is risen." 

Out on the highway John and Peter are run- 
ning to meet Him. And the Woman who gave 
Him to the world, the others who held Him in 
the world by their love and faith — "Mary, Mag- 
dalene and Johanna, and Mary, the mother of 
James, and other women" — they, too, are out on 
the highway explaining the splendour of it all 
to the apostles. 



[267] 



29 
SUMMER 



WAR and women and work — such as I 
am, they have made me. . . . The 
latest year was perfect in its way as 
the Field-house summer; in fact, I 
was happier in exterior things, for the peace of 
the world was more nearly established. The re- 
cent novel was finished, and throughout, even in 
title, reveals the effort to be plain, plain, plain; 
to say things in the speech of men, without the 
sacrifice of any dimension. Still it is only the 
big rock- facing of that ideal; some of the stones 
are set, but the pointing is not done. 

I want to put body and mind and spirit — into 
a book, as into a being. If there is vagueness, it 
is still bad work. I want to show that work and 
religion are the same; that a man who has found 
his work, receives his idea of God in it, and ex- 
presses the mystery best through it. The steps of 
growth which make for the excellence of one, are 
identical with the other. Man, raptly at the 
work he loves, is at his highest best, his replen- 

[268] 



SUMMER 



ishment from the energy that drives the suns, the 
very processes of his physical deterioration sus- 
pended. 

A man must find his own individuality, before 
his inseparable relation to his race is revealed. 
In the intense years of perfecting workman- 
ship, he struggles to bring to himself the re- 
wards of toil ; nearing mastery, he seeks to bestow 
his gifts to the race. In his work, the individual 
draws his first sense of the high passion to create. 
A man is changed for all time when this passion 
comes. It is designed for all men, but few of 
our generation have yet attained. It has proven 
far too abstract and ungripable for the many. 
Nature, not to be beaten, tempts the multitude 
with honey-drops to awaken desire and instinct; 
yet if all men were urged by the passion to create, 
children would be the aim, not the incident of 
marriage; marriage would lose its smudges of to- 
day; and eugenics would cease to imply calis- 
thenics and blood-tests, but would be a working 
force in the world, moving from the ethical out- 
ward, and not from the physical in. To the 
physically-minded, all is body. 

Few workers, even in the so-called fine arts, 
throb with the passion to create; or there would 
not be this leaping of whole schools at each fresh 
idea from an original producer. There would be 
no imitation. The passion to create is at peace 
only when the self is being expressed. To-day, 

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every idea is repeated and repeated, until at last 
it becomes even too common for the lips of men; 
and machines are made to multiply it. What a 
change in the massive array of the uninspired — if 
suddenly surged over them, the passion to create. 

It is a long way to poise and peace; the fret 
of the world is slow to cease against the heart. 
The rise of the workman (like the man in a vision 
who stood upon a pinnacle of skulls, and was told 
they were his own of former lives) is upon the 
necks of his illusions. Vocation is highly impor- 
tant to this peace ; but still more important is the 
vision of the mother to direct it. If the mother 
has given the child her vision and faith, her 
spiritual sustaining, he shall vanquish the in- 
dwelling world before the end; he shall know the 
quiescence of self, and of fear and desire. His 
life shall breathe sweetly upon his time before he 
goes, though he has made on the way every mis- 
take as a workman and a man. 

I came up wanting the world, aflame with the 
burning of ambition. I shudder at the force cre- 
ated during the years of struggle toward competi- 
tive supremacy. There was a time when my ex- 
tinction as an artist would have seemed more hid- 
eous and horrible than many details in the body. 

There is a poise in which man acquainted with 
grief, stands alone, serves men, loves his race, — 
the forces of his life sweetened, not turned from 

[270] 



SUMMER 



their task. This is not hardness nor austerity. 
It is a kind of master-tenderness that overcomes 
fear. It is realisation that the death of the body 
is not the end of man's relation to his loves. 

They call him a mystic — who hates the things 
that are seen about us. One name is as good as 
another; but it appears to me that he is a realist 
whose thoughts have turned from self, to the one- 
ness of all; from the temporal to the things that 
endure. I would sing always — the workman 
whose gaze is fixed ahead, who fights the things 
that are — the world-man and his mother. . . . 
He dreams of the source of the Nile, the new con- 
tinent; he spends his life planting apple seeds 
ahead of the pioneers; he builds a boat of pas- 
ture-oak and sails around the world, talking to 
God in solitude and storm; he senses the new 
power in the world, perceives the new star. 
He is the heaven-maker — for matter and flesh 
must follow and fit into his dream. Every form 
of life was first a thought. Action and matter 
follow the specifications of the thought, as water 
follows the curve of a basin. Every great serv- 
ant of the world first has the thought or the 
vision. He holds to that with such passion, that 
all suffering, even the Cross, is easy. 

There is a task for every man who has learned 
to listen; a task, or a dream, or an ideal. Our 
life to-day is but an answer to the dreams of past 
men. They gave their labour to the world; they 

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gave themselves to men. And these are the terms 
of spiritual motherhood, for women are closer to 
the visions and vitalities than we are. Accord- 
ing to the largeness and the beauty of the dream, 
is the child. • . . They could not be born again 
— those dynamos of greed and desire in the under- 
world — if men and women in the flesh did 
not give themselves to corresponding beastliness. 
They would wear out beneath the flesh. Nature 
would cleanse them quite away. 

... In one of the spring nights, I rode back 
from the postoffice to the little cottage by the 
lake. My horse walked down the long lane into 
the south and toward the shore. It was moon- 
less and a night of stars, the air clear and still. 
Orion was sinking low into the west. Vega was 
a blue-white flame in the northeast; the demon, 
Algol, a-gleam in the northwest; in the southwest 
the dog-star blazed, and nearly opposite in the 
lower east, completing a great square, Spika softly 
shone — Spika of the Virgin. 

It was all so orderly. Toward meridian, in 
tender majesty, arose Arcturus, the dearest of the 
distant suns to earth-men; and faintly I saw the 
universal beaming of the galaxy. . . . Stars and 
bees had always called and thrilled me. I re- 
member the bleak lie that came from high school, 
when I asked to study the stars. "It is almost 
pure mathematics, 5 ' was said. 

[272] 



SUMMER 



It isn't, but the study of God. 

In the first place, it is looking upward. You 
have heard Carlyle crying out in rage because 
no one had taught him the constellations as a 
child. Of the fourteen young men of the Upper 
Room whom I led out in the winter night, not 
one knew Taurus from Orion, nor Rigel from 
Betelguese. There is no blame to them, but to 
the brutal abstraction, World — so caught in com- 
mon things, so back-handed in bringing up the 
child. A hive of bees and the night skies — all 
that one can learn from child to prophet is in 
them. 

It was all so orderly; and yet those suns of 
space are but the great gods of matter, with 
planetary children all about them, dark for our 
eyes; with rebellious cometary forces seething in 
and out, destroying themselves, because they 
come not to abide in rhythm. And many of 
those distant planets, already cooled to support 
life, are large as our sun. ... I rode slowly. I 
thought of the seons of development on such a 
planet, whose age compared to our earth is like 
Father Time to the new child, where all boyish 
things are put away. 

I thought of the glories for men to rise in — 
of the planets swinging their solemn courses 
through the Swan binary, for instance — an or- 
ange sun rising upon a world-system, as a blue orb 
sets; or of the majesty of life on a planet between 

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the red and ancient Antares and its green sun- 
mate. 

Yet, with every thought, there was a return to 
earth, for this is the garden of our souls. There 
is Jupiter to show what earth has been, its sur- 
face a molten crust covered in thousands of miles 
of cloud and steam, its oceans still in air; and the 
moon, to show what earth shall be — scarcely turn- 
ing, hung in airless cold, its contraction finished, a 
corpse slowly carried forth to the covering of the 
interstellar night. 

But earth is yet young. I thought of her sav- 
age youth again — half-fused, the waters which 
were under the firmament, as yet undivided from 
the waters which were above the firmament; dim 
days of changeless season from pole to equator; 
and at last, the first burst of sunlight, after the 
coolness and condensation of the clouds into 
oceans and rivers. There was light. And what 
a scene — those first abortive forms of life in that 
burst of sunlight. That was the first touch of 
order and beauty upon chaos. 

That was Mother Earth's turning to her God, 
her emerging from the darkness of self-conscious- 
ness, to the radiance of her Source again. That 
was the impregnation of beauty and order. Her 
forces at last were contained and at rest. Yet, 
she is far even now from the apex of her bearing. 
Her rocks must yet break forth into singing, as 
her metals already answer at the touch of this 

[274] 



SUMMER 



strange new power, which makes order and straight- 
line-running in the crude atomic chaos of steel. 

Electricity was not always a planetary re- 
source. Potentially it existed, as there is poten- 
tial self -consciousness in the rabbit, and potential 
divinity in the self-man. Mother Earth under- 
going a continually heightened vibration had to 
reach a certain pitch of receptivity, before there 
could be electrical manifestation. This force 
shall become as common as muscular energy. 
Other more brilliant subtle and potent energies 
shall appear and adjust themselves to the spiritual 
will of man. 

. . . Suddenly I thought of it all — as a plan 
for the procreation of Sons of God. As clearly 
the process appeared to me, as the figures on the 
dial of a watch: 

Tw r elve, the superb, the perfect, at the top. 
Call it God, if you will, or Divine Consciousness, 
or the Absolute, or the Beginning. 

Then to the sixth hour, the gestation of life- 
bearing worlds; and the coming at last of one 
among many, known as Earth, to her period of 
returning to the sun — her Thy Will Be Done — 
her dawn of planetary order and beauty. The 
sixth hour might be called: A lichen upon a 
rock. 

The seventh hour: A lizard. 

The eighth hour: The lifting spines. 

The ninth hour: The animal -man. 
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The tenth hour: The self-man — here we are 
caught — but ahead on the road: 

The eleventh hour: The world-man. 

The twelfth hour : The God-men — the Sons — 
conscious, creative, spiritual forces — differing 
from one another, as the young oak trees differ 
from one another and from their sire, the splen- 
did centre of the forest; each prepared to estab- 
lish his centre and bring forth his kind. 

. . . My eyes were held a moment by the half- 
divine gleaming of Arcturus — a light already an- 
cient, — light that travels seven times, the second, 
around our equator, requiring two centuries to 
reach our eyes. . . . And there was a light at the 
window before me. My horse had stopped to 
feed upon the tender grass. Within the window 
were three fair young heads, all bent over this 
very typewriter, forming letters in approved way ; 
and they were very fair under the single lamp. 
I was full of respect for them. My mother 
passed by in the shadow; I heard Penelope sing- 
ing — and the whole scheme was so vast and so 
orderly and so beautiful, that I knelt upon the 
grass in happiness at my horse's head. 

My story is done. If I did not think there 
was a Voice from it all, be very sure it would not 
be told. Sometimes I am tired; sometimes fresh 
and strong, even content that the fighting is not 
all finished. The fact is, perfect peace is for 

[276] 



SUMMER 



another time and place; those are stolen hours 
here in which we play; the real lift of it all is in 
a man's work. All is well. It is only our bodies 
that tire. 

The pages that follow are not part of my 
story. They form part of the Abstraction from 
it all, as it comes to me at this half-way place. 
I would be glad to have you read it, because I 
think it is the best part: 



[277] 



30 

THE WORLD MAN AND 
HIS MOTHER 



A GLANCE first at the darker side of 
the shield: The modern world is 
heavy and overpowering. Man lives 
in terror of running out of something. 
He gathers together great gilded things, lest he 
fail to have bread; he attaches his mark of pos- 
session to women, lest his desire catch him empty- 
handed. He has not mastered desire, but has be- 
come a prey to it. 

Modern manhood falters and fails before cheap 
predicaments of matter and sense. It is almost 
incredible that the many have not grasped this 
self-evident truth: One cannot maim the weak 
nor lead the blind astray without suffering an 
abatement of his own native force. The spirit 
of man must conquer enemies infinitely more sub- 
tle than gluttony for physical possessions. The 
larger human consciousness is not reached until 
man has conquered intellectual arrogance, the dis- 
integrating force of worshipping inferiors, the 

[278 1 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

devilish magnetisms of artistic mastery, and 
finally that black enthralling passion for spiritual 
dominion. The self-conscious world of to-day 
has not even begun to cope with the big devils 
waiting to test the human spirit. At least, in 
this late hour, we should be facing worthier foes. 
As a race we should long since have been deliv- 
ered from petty illusions. If the many prove to 
love best the black road (for choice is a preroga- 
tive of self -consciousness) they should be men 
in their lawlessness. It is shameful indeed to be 
discovered in this year of our Lord — enmeshed 
in the low boyish disorders of greed and sensual- 
ity. The child and the imbecile are ashamed 
when caught in the thrall of these things. 

Commerce has taken the place of war, as the 
enemy to national life. The old decent ideal is 
gone from trade. Selling-cost and the package 
have devoured the value of the article. The 
downtown lie infests our evenings. Lies of trade 
have become lies of manners. Advertising has 
robbed us of the sense of words. Telephone and 
printing press, caught from the very apex of ma- 
terial ingenuity, have fallen to be the mighty mul- 
tipliers of the lie. 

Even the big devils of the world have risen 
above the greed for materials to the greed for 
power, and have long since put away the cheapest 
of dissipations which ruin the body. A devil 
knows best the value of the body. A man born 

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ill may become a saint; but a man cannot pander 
to his senses and preserve his decency. No spirit- 
ual illumination falls to him who holds an arro- 
gant appetite ; and that which many a man sees in 
woman and in food and drink and money is very 
often the form of an animal, fat from devouring 
his own soul. 

We are in momentary danger of death. 
Must we have a more obvious sentence of death 
upon us? To adjust our memoirs and expand 
our souls, must we, like Madame Roland, live in 
the shadow of a guillotine? . . . You are sen- 
tenced to death in five minutes, in five or fifty 
years. Why banish the thought in laughter and 
the clatter of tools? There is glory about it. 
Visioning that glory you will not spend your days 
and nights in a frenzy to buy cheap and sell dear. 
The way is the way of compassion — the turning 
of the currents of one's life outward, instead of 
in. This is loving one's neighbour. 

I do not write as a religionist. The way of 
compassion is the way of world-work and man- 
hood. We are so constructed as men, that 
our souls cannot breathe, when all the currents 
and energies of the life are turned inward. It is 
good to love one's neighbour, for love is service; 
love is giving. As the soul outpours in service — 
and this is the secret — its inbreath, its replenish- 
ment, is of the vitality that makes immortal 
health. The spiritual body of man is formed of 

[280] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

this replenishment, integrated from it. This 
spiritual body does not die. 

The whole evolution from a bent spine is a 
learning how to love. The animal man loved 
himself, and through desire first, a sex-opposite; 
the self-man saw his image in his children and 
learned to love them for it. In the expansions 
of humanity we have learned to love our friends. 
The world-man hurls out his splendid offering to 
the race. The God-man is universal, a cosmic 
creative force. 

With this compassion, one sustains the weak, 
worships the true, throbs exquisitely in the 
planetary tides of anguish and happiness. With 
this culture, one thinks with one's soul, without 
which process a man cannot become an individual. 
The soul does not analyse, it realises. This out- 
pouring with its immortal replenishment is the 
true chivalry. The lining of such Compassion- 
ates is a continual radiation that uplifts and ig- 
nites other men. It knows no fear; it triumphs 
over death; the death of the flesh of such men is 
an exaltation. The integrated eternal spirits of 
such men are the first fruits of Mother Earth, the 
purpose and vindication of earth-life — the endur- 
ing yield. 

Matter is dead. The touch of quickening 
spirit upon matter awakened the first lichen upon 
the rock; the touch of quickening spirit upon 

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chaos shook forth the first form. Life itself is 
the union of matter and spirit; you turn on the 
force and the machine moves. Spirit is the 
power; matter the instrument. According to the 
fineness of the matter is its receptivity to spiritual 
force. The human brain is the finest product of 
sunlight; it is matter in its finest state. The most 
sensitive brain attracts the most powerful spiritual 
energy. 

The death of the body is the separation of spirit 
from matter. If the spirit has not been integrated 
more powerfully; if it has not approached more 
nearly to conscious creative force, through its long 
or short sojourn in flesh — the life has been wasted. 

If the whole life has been given to material 
things, the consciousness, after the separation of 
flesh and spirit, will be identified with the corrup- 
tion. If the life has been one of spiritual aspira- 
tion, the consciousness, after the separation of flesh 
and spirit, will be identified with immortality. 
The scabbard falls; the flashing blade is raised. 
This is the triumph over death, the swallowing of 
death in victory. 

Man's attitude to death in the midst of the 
life of the body is a certain indication of the 
spiritual force which animates him. 

Man's illumination in the flesh is the transfer 
of his consciousness from the body to the soul. 
In making this transfer an eternal identity is 
fixed. "The guest has arrived." This transfer 

[282] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

takes place when the receptivity of the mind has 
reached a certain fineness. The body and brain 
must first be mastered ; the life currents must turn 
outward in service to men before this mastery 
is established, and before the superb spiritual re- 
plenishment can be received. The high gracious- 
ness of the plan is that we are none alike. It 
is best through finding our own especial task that 
the self can be subdued. 

Behind task, behind mind, behind our intrinsic 
spiritual endowment, is a man's mothering. 

Two boys team along through their school-days 
together, and emerge into the world. Five years 
later, the triumphs of one are still identified with 
school and college. He is revolving in an orbit, 
the extreme boundary of which was reached in 
the be-ribboned presentation of degree. His com- 
panion has forgotten, and been born again 
in the larger dimension of world-learning. Some 
latent urge is making an individual of the sec- 
ond; and the lack of it has left the first a mere 
unit of the herd. 

Two w T riters evolve through the early struggles 
with an equal dribble of success. Their eyes are 
concentrated upon the moving matter of their age. 
This is their giant task-master. They produce 
zealously in this raw body of things, and it an- 
swers at last. Five years later, one has begun to 
put away these boyish effects; his work has risen 
from matter to mind, and a softening, visioning 

[283] 



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spirit is upon him, strangely igniting his in- 
tellectual forces. He will say to you raptly that 
his real work is just beginning. The other is 
still multiplying his horses, guns, dollar-signs and 
tinted sounding shells of femininity. 

The difference was there before they were 
born. It lies in their intrinsic gift of spiritual 
vitality. A billion elements go into the making 
of a boy, but there is one fundamental agent of 
his greatness or commonness, one immediate source 
of his freshness and endurance in the world; one, 
more than any other, who determines the quality 
of his receptive surface, and the capacity of the 
feed-wire which connects it with the spiritual 
driving force of his race. This agent is his 
mother. She is not only the crucible; she is the 
culminating component of his life. She is the 
intimate, the marvellous source. It is the spirit 
which a woman gives her child before birth, 
which sustains and rebears him to the larger fields 
of manhood and service. It is more wonderful 
than health or brain or any beauty. The mother 
can surmount the past and its myriad compounds. 
This is eugenics ; this is spiritual creativeness. 

There is a mothering of the body, and a mother- 
ing of the soul; there is an automatic bestowal 
of what we have at hand upon a child, and there 
is a conscious intensive cultivation of the hu- 
man spirit. This is the highest art of human 
service. This is the motherhood of the future, of 

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MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

world-men, not of self-men. All the devils of 
hell cannot spoil the fruits of such maternities. 

Man's illumination — the transfer of his con- 
sciousness from the flesh to the spiritual body — 
is the one perfect answer to his mother's soul-gift. 

You can see it in any child, the down-pull and 
the up-lift; the audacity of days and the distress 
of nights; the impulse to evil, and the working 
alone of a corrective tendency. The motherhood 
of the body supplies the instrument of expression 
which in due season can resist no longer the 
gravitation of the earth; the mothering of the 
soul supplies the spiritual expression itself, and 
this answers to the levitation which defies death. 

This is the age of woman's transition. 
Change is invariably accompanied by restlessness 
and pain. Man does not know to-day the 
thoughts that live in his own house. Mostly he 
would not understand if he were told. The rest- 
lessness of women everywhere is the result of the 
breaking-up of the old lies of man's world. The 
cry of women for equality is but one of the revela- 
tions of transition. There is a greater sex-revolt. 
For the first time in the world, the left hand 
is raised against the right. There is a revolt 
against children as a by-product of marriage, a 
revolt against the vulgar nature of marriage it- 
self; finally there is the ghostly grey path of 
sterility running from the east to the west. 

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The higher the moral and intellectual evolu- 
tion of a people, the more essential become space, 
leisure, and soul-expression for bringing children 
into the world. When a certain people have be- 
come individuals, and the elements of greatness 
are formative within them, they pay the price for 
reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. 
The race that produced our few great workmen, 
that founded our culture and gave us a name in 
English, is following the red Indian westward 
off the face of the earth. 

One of the enthralling mysteries of life is that 
children will not come to highly evolved men and 
women who have turned back upon their spiritual 
obligation and clouded the vision which was their 
birthright. 

Women divine these things, if they do not utter 
them. The restlessness of women arises from 
them; for restlessness and moral illness are ever 
the results when one's work is not being done. A 
renewal of the ancient and authoritative ideal 
must come, and at once. Either the women 
themselves will distract men from their concentra- 
tion upon brute matter, or out of conflicts, and 
the thrilling vision of their causes, prophets will 
be born. 

The elder Scripture is remembered by this 
thought, and the innumerable times when the 
Hebraic Jehovah called the children of Israel to 
halt in their evils, through acts, covenants and 

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MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

visions of women, as witness Hannah, Deborah, 
Rachel and Ruth. Such may be the transforming 
component of the spiritual experiment, America. 
The salient inner force which women hold may 
be brought to bear — may become the balance of 
power. From somewhere, vision must be brought 
to the man-ordered materiality of the present 
time; mind must be added to brain; intuition to 
logic; divination to reason. 

Man's tendency in the ordering of an art, a 
business, a romance, a house or a nation, is to 
rush to the physical and exterior well-being of 
his task. Woman's mission in the world, how- 
ever the many may be jarred by instances to the 
contrary, is to foster and augment the spiritual 
life of the race. She is the artist and the sculp- 
tor of the race. The great men we need so bit- 
terly must be animate with her dreams — as have 
been the great men of days less evil than these. 
But women, so fluent to adapt to strange condi- 
tions, must not fall in man's ways, must not falter 
in the attraction and novelty of the affairs so 
noisy and uppermost now. Women must be 
very sure that it is their spiritual aliment for 
which the nation suffers. From all save women 
who are great enough to be unlike the men of to- 
day — oh, Lord, deliver us. 

We want from women first of all that which 
is plain and true. Great motherhood with all 
its mystic glowing is based upon the first princi- 

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pies of integrity. This is the ancient hill-rock 
upon which the arts were first graven, and to 
which the images came — fortitude, purity, hope, 
vision. How these would sing in our dry and 
hardening national arteries. How pitifully does 
the sick man, America, need great mothering now. 

There is hope that the spiritual flower of the 
generation to follow us will be superb, but there 
is no hope of it being large. Never on earth was 
a planting less substantially stemmed, rooted so 
weakly ; and never was its seasonal and specific 
parasites in such number and state of devouring. 
The younger generation has all the breadth of 
tolerance for evil that is a gift of the gods — but 
it lacks the vision, and the cleaving to the good, 
without which tolerance is a curse. The torrent 
of brutalities so balmily condoned by our in- 
tensely modern set, has swept away the stamina 
and personal purity which makes tolerance God- 
like. 

The excellent mystery between the sexes which 
has been the drive of art, which has broadened 
the brows of children, kept burning the fires of 
romance and idealism; that additional sacred- 
ness of spirit added to flesh, which has lifted the 
human sex-relation out of the scope of all other 
fertilisations — one writes it with awe and bitter- 
ness — has passed away before the soulless 
straight-seeing of the younger generation. 

Before God, it was not an illusion — this that 
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MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

has vanished. It was the pearl of great price. It 
was the cement and evil-proofing of our spiritual 
evolution. Love is lost without it — the mating 
of humans is but a commerce. Without it there 
is no restlessness for great service, nor great utter- 
ance; Compassion, the art of the future, sickens 
in its inception; without it there are no "white 
presences among the hills." 

The young men just behind us who have taken 
what we have, and must show us before we go, 
the way of to-morrow — this younger male genera- 
tion — look at the wasting face of it, under its fa- 
vourite downtown lamps. You have seen the 
low sharp stamp of trade, the animalism that is 
rhythmic; you have heard the facile falsity of 
its speech, the sleet of its laughter. Speak to 
this composite of Vision, of Compassion, of 
Heaven, of the Future — and you are an alien. 
It does not know your language, scorns it and 
you. There are nuns in the world because of it; 
the loveliest of the potential mothers are child- 
less in their brief hour because it is so. 

And many of the young women who mate in 
these conditions, for the most part, bring to their 
motherhood all the worldly sophistication of the 
most-knowing fathers of the preceding generation. 
Given a spiritual discernment to balance, only 
largeness of calibre could come from this, but the 
child whose heritage is spiritual nonentity and 
glib worldliness is pitifully deprived of anchor- 

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age in the swift betraying tides of to-day. The 
spectacle of the world has not made this modern 
mother recoil. In despising ancient prudishness, 
she has met revelations which every evolving hu- 
man must face — but without restoring her soul 
against them, without shriving herself among the 
clean hills. Immortals are not born of such 
people. 

The man risen to a master-workman is no 
longer a stranger to the minds of women. Ac- 
cording to the value of his work, is he a guest of 
the immediate few or of the expansive many. 
Every high-born child partakes of the qualities of 
these heroic guests. This is an instinct toward 
race-perfection, one of the forces of humanity's 
drive forward. 

Nothing ever compared in racial importance to 
the promise of a messiah which became a con- 
viction in the breast of every Jewish woman. 
Prophets, judges and soldiers were the incidents 
of that great dream's maturing. Prophecies more 
and more identified the messiah, because the 
messianic ideal was the spiritual property be- 
stowed by the mothers of men. Again and again 
this ideal kept the race from sinking. Jesus was 
the culmination. 

There is no law to prevent avatars being born 
into the world, other than the lack of vessels 
fine and pure enough, through which they may 

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MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

appear. The real divines are first of all eager to 
return for service. Compassion for men is the 
very pith of their spiritual integration. Reach- 
ing a certain glory beyond their race — the answer 
is a turning back to lift the race to that glory. 
They see as we cannot, the oneness of all life, for 
that is the central sun in the heavens, for the eyes 
of the illuminati. The spiritual progress of the 
world-men is delayed by our failures. As we used 
to say in the cavalry — "as fast as the slowest 
horse," — that determined the pace of the charge. 

There is no law to prevent avatars being born 
into the world, other than the lack of vessels fine 
and pure enough. ... Look at the contour of 
a stretch of woodland against the sky. Two or 
three trees stand a little above the rest. You do 
not see one of upper Oregon's mammoth firs, nor 
a California red-wood, whose trunk would still be 
naked a half-hundred feet above the top-foliage 
of this woodland. There must be the soil. It 
is difficult to imagine an isolated monarch of the 
western sea mists in the midst of oaks and elms 
and maples, which do not furnish the height, nor 
the densities of shade to challenge such lofty up- 
rearing strength. 

The avatar must grow up in the midst of his 
time, a child and boy and man; his brain and 
body trained by the prevailing tendencies and 
instincts of his race. The intrinsic drive of his 
spiritual gift must surmount them all, must turn 

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against them all, but he is marked and wearied and 
weakened on the way. It is far less miraculous 
for such a being to appear and flourish, in the 
midst of a racial ideal; in truth a great human 
spirit is the inevitable answer to a racial ideal, 
but his way is prepared by prophets and mighty 
men, who herald a master, because they are the 
earlier fruits of the very ideal which must produce 
him. 

The preparers are upon us now. The transi- 
tion tells that; the tearing down tells that. After 
the wrecking shall arise the forces of construction 
— the restorers of the dream to the motherhood 
of the race — and finally one above all. An 
avatar is but an integrated ideal — a creative spirit- 
ual force, returning to flesh to impregnate his race 
with his ideal. 

The idea of beauty of the average man is sen- 
suous. He has inflicted this idea upon his man's 
world — upon his sons and daughters and mates — 
during all the dark centuries in which the making 
of men has been in his power, instead of woman's. 
Spiritual beauty is austere and foreign to the aver- 
age man because of this sensuous consciousness. 

Multitudes of women go about their life to- 
day, using but their lowlier faculties— speaking, 
answering, working, their deeper life unspoken, 
unanswered, unused. Multitudes of women have 
their children, before they know what they lack, 

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MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

before they perceive the low estate of their usage 
in a man's world. Multitudes of women, out of 
the restlessness and agony of middle life, in which 
the realisation comes that their real natures have 
not been called forth, perceive about them the 
children of their bodies, but strangers to the 
awakening mother souls. . . . And who is this 
man of the world who comes home at night — this 
stranger whom one calls Husband? 

There are multitudes of women who have no 
children, who have been able to find or accept 
no man which the world has shown them ; multi- 
tudes, whose spirits awaken through the very 
agony of empty arms. 

When one considers the shames, the dreads, the 
offensiveness, which have preyed upon matters of 
sex from the beginnings of self-consciousness, the 
wonder is not that we are spiritually flaccid and 
myopic; rather that any are preparing to enter 
the clearer country of world-manhood. Yet the 
few are already emerging. The depth and black- 
ness of the tragedy of women has already chal- 
lenged the forerunners of a giant among the spirit- 
ual champions. A new dream must be brought 
to motherhood; the defiling sense of sin must be 
eradicated from the loves of women, and their 
pitiful expectancy of brutal tokens from men. 
Women must be inspired to express their best. 
Their lives in this man's world of to-day permits 
them to express only their coarsest and lowest. 

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The grown man who can accept the gift of a 
woman, bestowed with love upon him — without 
undergoing a succession of crashes in his own un- 
derstanding, vague upheavals at least, is a kind 
of destroyer that the community is well rid of. 

There is not a single incident in the human love 
episode, from the moment the girl baby first 
plays at mothering, until the time when she takes 
into her arms, the child of her youngest child — 
that she is not by nature the ruling spirit. She 
is overwhelmingly designed for the initiative in 
all that pertains to earth's replenishing. 

. . . The words from the lips of a woman in 
the ecstasy of love are mystical, vibrant from the 
very source of things. She does not remember 
them; they escape art; they should lift a man to 
spiritual chivalry. . . . There is something in a 
woman's yielding that holds the ultimate secret. 
The man who is not hushed in the presence of 
it, is not sensitive to divine presence. In this first 
great giving of woman — the past is obliterated. 
There is no background to this high divining mo- 
ment. The flame that woman glows with, in 
such an hour, is from the future. She is a love- 
instrument played upon by creative light. 
. . . The essence of the glory of these high hours 
of women is their spontaneity. Man should be 
the slave of them. . . . There comes an hour — 
that is the sweetest mystery in Nature. 

Man is very crude indeed not to know that in 

[294] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

the more perfect bestowals of women, he is but 
the symbol of an archangel — the symbol of some- 
thing to be — which calls forth this great giving 
from her. He is not as she saw him an hour ago, 
nor as she will see him again. He is lost in the 
brightenings of her vision ; the flame from the fu- 
ture envelopes him; the forces are about her which 
surmount flesh and conquer heredity. 

There comes an hour — like all the mysteries of 
Nature, of which it is the highest, — like the flight 
of the bee queens, the lifting of wings through all 
the woodland festivals, like the turning of comets 
back to the sun. 

What has man to do in the managing of this 
supreme transaction? Why should he be arbiter 
in this cosmic affair? What business has he to 
make her stop to think, because of his property- 
mindedness, if she has married him or not; why 
should he be allowed to dedicate June, when the 
miracle is done in May? By what right does he 
hold the future of the race, like papers in a vault, 
— man, who chooses his woman by her face and 
figure, collects her by a process of deal-making, 
cinches the bargain through a priest of his own 
development, and appraises her motherhood 
ecstasy in terms of the five senses? 

Do not mistake — as men, we are sons of 
women, who are daughters of men. One as a 
race, w r e are; one in the relation to the future; as 
one, we must suffer for the lost ideal; as one we 

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must suffer because the mother has lost her 
dream. ... It was to our importuning that she 
succumbed; it was our greed for her body, that 
took from her the love-initiative, and crushed the 
mystic beauty out of her ideal. We are not rich 
as men; we are half-men, because of our desire. 
Yet we shall share the splendour of the restora- 
tion days. 

And this is man's work: The creature who 
eight times the year, obeys the tradesmen's instinct 
for style; who has broken her bearing with cen- 
turies of clothes-bondage, fed her brain upon 
man's ideas of sex, her body upon food bought 
for her and prepared by people whom she does 
not respect; who has not yet heard the end of a 
dollar-discussion begun when her baby ears first 
noted sounds; who holds in shame all that is 
mighty of her genius, and who has finally ac- 
cepted as a mate, one of her male familiars — she 
is a man-made creature, in whom is buried a 
woman. She is man's ignorance and effrontery 
incarnate — the victim of his mania for material 
proprieties, which from the beginning have 
utterly desecrated spiritual truth. 

But again, we are deep in the pangs of a transi- 
tion which shall bring better days. There is that 
in woman, though latent so long, though missing 
for generations, which the lies of a man's world 
have proved unable to destroy. This ideal is im- 
mortal or it would have been stamped out. The 

[ 296] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

native beauty of this ideal is shown in the tend- 
ency which inspires women to turn with strange 
ardor to the world's master workmen. This is 
her innate selecti veness again ; a sorry bit of vital- 
ity left from that absorbing instinct of the old 
time (which is but a foreshadow of the new), 
when every mother in Israel believed that she had 
a chance to bring forth the messiah. 

The master of this transition shall restore the 
ideal to woman, and to her daughter. From 
some woman's soul-gift he shall come ; out of her 
sorrow and agony, he shall rise. He shall not 
give women children of his, but his spirit shall 
restore the dream. Through the cloud-rack and 
the city-murk his vision shall erect the constella- 
tions. . . . Those women who listen but for a 
moment— will not bear the children that would 
have come to them^ if they had not listened. 

The stuff of herds comes into being through the 
motherhood of the body; only where there is 
vision, may enter the individual. Only where 
light is integrated, can great light be endured; 
for the shock of illumination would break down 
the tissues of a man, not already bathed in spirit- 
ual fire. 

Motherhood first of all, (the intrinsic gift of 
spiritual vitality, which a woman bestows with 
faith and dreams upon her yet unformed child), 
brings about the answering vision from the grown 
man thirty years afterward; turns him from a 

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self-server to a server of men. It is the mother's 
soul-gift which makes the individual. The in- 
dividual saves himself from the world, because 
he finds his Task. Herds are made of those who 
have failed to find their tasks. First the mother, 
then the vocation, then the world-man — and with 
every world-man born, a great task shall be done, 
and the race shall find itself presently incapable 
of being and living as before. 

Motherhood, vocation, illumination — that 
white, irresistible flood of the spirit, the very vi- 
tality of God, breaking through the consciousness 
of men, inspiring the utterance, making incan- 
descent the vials of mirth and tenderness, co- 
hering the separate realisations with the inevi- 
table spiritual line; hurling its- light into crypts 
where the treasures of the past eternity of experi- 
ence are stored; driving its fire ahead as far into 
the eternity of the future, signalising the man, a 
prophet, and the woman a mother of the world. 

There is a teaching for those children already 
with us: that the mighty glories of humanity 
must come to earth through them ; that angels are 
near, when one turns the current of the inner life 
outward; that the great strength of heroes is of 
their giving- forth — their outpouring of love; that 
the reason for being is to pour forth our service 
and compassion; that we are sick and forgotten 
when we do not breathe forth our best. Children 
have a strange understanding of these things — 

[298] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

as if they were closer to the source of them. Lit- 
tle girls seem sometimes half-divine in their un- 
derstanding — when told that God will send His 
angels to them for their children, and not little 
tainted animal babies — if they show themselves 
pure enough in their outpouring of love. There 
is no other ideal of comparable importance in edu- 
cation. 

This is eugenics — in spite of the physical thral- 
dom which identifies and blasphemes the word 
to-day. 

The growth of the human spirit is from sim- 
plicity to complication, and back to simplicity 
again, each circle in a nobler dimension of prog- 
ress. There is the simplicity of the peasant and 
the simplicity of the seer. Between these two 
lie all the confusion and alarm of life; a passage 
of disorder well-designated Self-consciousness. 

Here are the rapids, the calling rocks, false 
lights, the dragons and all ferocity; here are fear, 
greed, desire, the sirens and all sensuousness. 
Every lasting epic has pictured the passage in 
part before Ulysses and since Peer Gynt. Every 
returning knight has portrayed his particular 
devils. The journey or voyage is the one story 
in the world, the one drama, the one allegory. 

Conscious of himself, man goes forth on his own 
will. For the time, the divine will is abrogated, 
and this constitutes the only hell there is. 

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The orders of life beneath man, played upon 
by natural forces, render back no answering in- 
dividual expression. Man, self-conscious, re- 
alises not only himself, but his neighbour. Sor- 
did and infinite complications arise. Not only 
does he sense his own desires and appetites, but 
perceives his neighbour's — how his neighbour sat- 
isfies them. That envy and competition should 
result, is as inevitable as humidity when the rain 
clouds are close in hot weather; as inevitable as 
the product of greed out of desire, and cruelty out 
of fear. Moreover, to a man, self-conscious, it 
appears as obviously as light and darkness, that 
there are matters to tell and matters to withhold. 
Concealment and perversion of fact are the fruits 
of this particular planting. From lying and de- 
ceiving his neighbour, the illusion thickens until a 
man lies and deceives himself, and he is adrift 
in the dragon seas, indeed. It would appear, 
misery and tribulation thus upon him, that man 
would realise his own will accomplished this ; that 
his own will, and none other, had betrayed him. 
Yet all human history is held in the interval of 
man's failure to perceive this plain law of cause 
and effect. All enduring human achievement, in 
tone and stone and word and pigment, repeats 
the tragedy of the self-conscious will, and the 
final Thy will be done of certain belated val- 
iants, yet only the brotherhood dreamers perceive 
it to-day. 

[300] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

Man must master himself to listen to the higher 
law; that is the difficulty. The man who enters 
a cage of wild beasts, knows well that if he mas- 
ters himself he is safe. In a self-conscious life, 
properly spent, man masters himself. He is not 
eligible to enter the spiritual elect, until this is 
accomplished. Dante's descent into hell pictures 
the multitudes enchanted for millenniums in their 
especial illusions. One lesson, but one, from it 
all : if you do not master your devil in self-con- 
scious life, you will feel his mastery afterward. 

There is an eternal splendour in the plan that 
the self-man must master himself to become the 
world-man. Self-consciousness with all its tor- 
ture and travail of experience, is the only known 
portage from that inland lake, which is the sim- 
plicity of the peasant, to the oceanic simplicity 
of the seer. 

In his very nature, the world-man can only 
come into being of his own volition. You force 
and direct the will of your child, but wisely with- 
draw and await his call for help, if ever his man- 
hood is to be secured. So the divine will with- 
draws itself, and man makes his world for a sea- 
son. We look around at the sorry job of it, but 
we must not be lost in its apparitions. Since the 
only evil in the world is the misuse of self-con- 
sciousness, and since self-consciousness is the only 
passage to emancipation, a new clarity comes to 
the frequent reiteration of philosophers that there 

[SOl] 



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is no sin. Accepting this, one must declare also 
that there is no good. 

Recall the parable of the Sower. Evil cannot 
be denied, since all the seeds scattered in the gar- 
den of earth do not bring forth their spiritual 
fruit. Stony ground, indeed, is this self-con- 
sciousness, and many fall therein. There is a 
destructive element at work in life, a push for 
every pull, or the planets would not spin. There 
is a left hand that withholds, for the right that 
impels; a gravitation that demands death for the 
levitation that uplifts to world vision. Sin is as 
good a name as another for this destroying force, 
and it is foolish to affirm its non-existence. 

Without evil there could be no development, 
nor any sense of good. Since man apprehends 
good with the beginnings of his spiritual con- 
sciousness, there would be no such consciousness 
without evil. Without knowledge of good and 
evil, there could be no conscious creative force. 
In self-consciousness, man learns good and evil. 
The beginnings of spiritual consciousness appear 
from choosing the good and discarding the evil. 
Spiritual consciousness, its flowering and fruit- 
age, is the only worthy answer of Mother Earth 
for her spiritual impregnation, and for the seons of 
quickening solar energy played upon her. 

God is the spiritual source of life. The finer 
the human consciousness, the less will God be 
humanised in conception; the more atrocious ap- 

[ 302 ] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

pears the tendency to confine him to man-made 
forms. You must be a god to conceive God. 
That which drives the world is the vitality of 
God — a divine emanation. Thus God is in the 
starry night, in the wash of the waves; in the 
corn and olives and grapes, in the cattle and the 
wheat. The more potent the divine force in any 
creature, the greater its glory. More finely and 
powerfully integrated than elsewhere, this divine 
force is integrated in the soul of man. 

As the heart of man is the organ of the blood, 
the soul of man is the organ of the spirit. Its 
systole and disastole is service on the one hand, 
and inspiration on the other. The heart belongs 
to the temporary instrument; and the soul, in its 
developed state is an exchange, or sub-station, of 
the great central spiritual energy which is, by 
every indication, everlasting. The value of each 
sub-station is its individuality. It receives the 
same power in its inspiration; but gives forth 
service of its own kind. ... As the dry seed con- 
tains the embryonic plant and its first nutriment, 
so the flesh of man is the nourishing matrix of 
his soul. The plan is the same; the scale larger 
and more beautiful. 

By every observation, law and analogy in life, 
the constructive purpose at work in the world, is 
toward the end of the increase of spiritual re- 
ceptivity in every creature, a continually height- 
ening vibration toward the key-rhythm. There is 

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the seeming inertia of minerals, the group or sim- 
ple consciousness of animals, the self -conscious- 
ness of humanity at large, the flowering of the 
greater consciousness in the world-men; and 
finally the first fruits of earth — divinely-con- 
scious Man, the Son of God and Mother Earth. 
From that seeming inertia of the rock, to the more 
or less pure integration of spiritual consciousness 
which is Godhood, every step of the progress is a 
refining of matter to a heightened vibration — in- 
creased spiritual receptivity, increased capacity 
for inspiration. 

Spirit, in itself, the emanation of God, is the 
universal driving force. For the integration of 
spirit into centralised systems — for the very iden- 
tifying of its consciousness in separate beings — 
matrices of matter are required. This is the pur- 
pose of the union of God, the Father, and Earth, 
the Mother. All earth creatures are products of 
this union. The great constructive scheme of 
this union is the production of divine men, in 
whom spiritual force is no longer diffused and 
dependent upon matter, but integrated through 
matter, into conscious creative being. This is the 
Godhood of man. 

Each spiritual consciousness is a growth of 
separate and individual history. Each has a 
thread of experience that runs from the begin- 
ning, from the very rock itself. This thread runs 
through the passage of self-consciousness, where 

f 304 ] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

the climaxes of earth-experience are reached, and 
where self-mastery is won or lost. Not one of 
these threads of experience can ever be duplicated. 
According to it, is determined the quality of the 
individual's art or action. Since there will never 
be another like it, the decay and ruin of a human 
soul, in self-consciousness, is the only tragedy in 
the world. 

A butterfly is crawling through the high June 
grass, dragging its weather-blackened cocoon. 
The sun is shining, but she is caught in the dewy 
shade. Her ancient shelter is bound about her 
vitals, locking the damp untried wings. Sun- 
light will dry her wings to slip forth; sunlight 
will dry and fold back the rent in the cocoon ; sun- 
light will set her free. If she fails to reach the 
sunlight, her strength will pass, and the worms 
will find her there . . . trembling, untried 
wings, useless wings that blow softly among 
twigs and grasses, and the hungry denizens of the 
surface earth. • . . Yet, all the time the sun is 
shining. 

Self-conscious man comes toward the spiritual 
sunlight — trailing his past, trailing his* earthly 
house. These are burdens that answer only to 
the force of gravitation. Up to the time of his 
breaking forth from the ancient shelter of simple 
consciousness, his destiny was divinely planned. 
Now in the consciousness of a different light shin- 

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ing strangely upon his faculties, he must use his 
own strength and render his own decision. He 
has reached the crossing of the past and the fu- 
ture — the dramatic hour of all evolution. There 
is a universal suspense while he makes his choice. 
To emerge into the spiritual sunlight, he must 
cast off all incumbrance and appearance. 

Self-conscious man stands listening, poised in 
the balance of time. His body feels the pull of 
the earth; his soul inclines to the lift of spirit- 
ual generation. Even in the tenement of flesh, 
he feels the warmth of that perfect radiance. 
Even through the windows of the flesh, he per- 
ceives his own, the Light. If he does not go 
forth into that light — consciously and in order — 
lo, he shall surely die. For this is the law. 
Achieving self-consciousness, he has fixed an 
identity. The return of that identity to earth is 
its destruction. He must go forth consciously 
and in order to the light of spiritual sun. Sud- 
denly in that light, he shall feel the ecstasy of 
wings. 

This is the great turning. Man drinks and 
thirsts again — until he turns to the Living Water. 
Man eats of the bread and perishes — until he 
turns to the Bread of Life. In self-consciousness, 
man has reached the time when the earth will not 
sustain him. The root to the ground; the flower 
to the sun. Man has flowered to the spiritual 
light, and the earth no longer contains the more 

T 306 ] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

essential elements of his nourishment. This is 
the one truth of the world — all else is vain and 
trivial compared to it. And yet it is almost too 
simple to grasp — that henceforth man must listen 
and lean upon and look toward the spiritual force 
that drives the world, and not to the increment 
of this force, which matter is. 

All arts, all inventions, all that glows in the 
world, all compassion, all beauty of service, is 
energised from the beginnings of spiritual con- 
sciousness — all that makes men loved and re- 
membered and idealised. 

Hell itself is the perfect system. Without it 
you cannot deliver over your developed will and 
mastered self to receive in turn the higher con- 
sciousness. You must descend into hell to bring 
back the consciousness of all that you passed 
through, and escaped, in order to earn an in- 
stantaneous and familiar sympathy with the 
world — the first and most important requisite of 
the world-man. Hell itself is right — the tragedy 
is to remain. The tragedy is to fail to see, in 
the midst of a thousand evidences, the horror and 
d rch of its illusions. 

War, commercial madness, all the vanities of 
intellect, all appeals to fancied elects, all schools 
of art which for a day exploit their technicalities, 
all caste, class, slavery, all cults and departures, 
are but the detainers of self-consciousness. Men 
have identified themselves emotionally with all 

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these things, and been betrayed by them. The 
most flagrant illusion of them all is materialism. 
Without the idealist there could be no heaven. 
Man makes his heaven by his thoughts in the 
flesh. Peace and the amplitude, the beauty and 
the glory of spiritual consciousness, can only be 
claimed, pointed off and made perfect, by the 
man who has made the surveys of his country 
from the life in the flesh. The realist will find 
his own base materials, nothing more, a sufficient 
hell. 

The return of man to the divine will with his 
treasures of individuality — that is the high way. 
Man, a living record of his own adventures, 
bound in flesh, high creation of earth, realising 
himself, and returning from his latest and great- 
est voyage of discovery, bringing his splendid 
gifts to the Master — that is the illumination of 
the world-man. . . . Caught in the illusions of 
the world, fighting to establish a separate mastery, 
betraying the Master who equipped him for the 
journey — that is the treachery and the tragedy of 
Lhe soul. 

The terrible secret of many a spiritual striver 
has been his inability to love something which 
he dare not conceive. He is told to love God. 
The stars are not God. He tries to send out his 
worship, between and beyond the stars, his mind 
torturing itself to fix the point of God. Many 
have wasted in this delusion. ... I see from my 

[ 308 ] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

window the standing corn, rows of peas and 
beans in rich maturing, the mystery of decay in a 
pile of compost, dipping meadow-lands, the yel- 
low floor of a fresh-cut oat-field with the tumbled 
shocks; I see the distant elms. If the door were 
open, I could see the bee-hives — most wonderful 
of all. For the bees take the present of the 
flowers and give them back their future. 

Often the eyes sting with a sudden sense of the 
beauty and mystery of common things — that is 
the love of God in man's heart. Man may love 
the master-souls among men; thrill with love at 
the laughter of children; he may love the myriad 
evidences of God in the world. The view from 
the window, the saddle horse lifting his head to 
listen to the distant train — the whole glowing 
pastoral from this window — from any window — 
thrills with the spirit of God. 

Does the old bee-keeper demand of the bees — 
Love me? They serve him best by loving one 
another. When all are at their highest best— they 
are raptly at work together. The old beekeeper 
will see them through the winter. . . . God 
loves the world through the souls of men. We 
receive the love of God — that is the in-breathing, 
that is the inspiration. The outpouring is serv- 
ice to men. We love God by loving our neigh- 
bour — that is the immortal formula. Presently 
we shall see the sons of God in the eyes of pass- 
ing men. 

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MIDSTREAM 



On a certain morning, a man found an insect 
drama enacting at the edge of his garden. His 
eyes and brain were occupied in the drawing mys- 
tery of it, while his fuller, deeper faculties sank 
into a trance of contemplation. That was his 
hour. The very road to Damascus, it proved for 
him. There and then he realised: All life is 
One. . . . This sense of oneness is the beginning 
of the world-man's consciousness. This sense of 
oneness is the first deep breath of the soul; this 
is the in-breathing, the inspiration. Realising 
this, one regards the stranger with awe and ten- 
derness, and with compassion he regards the deep- 
est-down man. From this thrilling sense of the 
Fatherhood of God and the Motherhood of 
Earth — and only from this — can come the 
Brotherhood of Man. 

Earth seen at a glance, moonlit on one side, sun- 
lit on the other ; trees and oceans, mountains, ani- 
mals and men, all breathed upon by the great 
refining spirit of God; at a glance, the perception 
that the difference between the saint and the 
saurian is just in receptivity to spiritual vibra- 
tion; the instant knowledge that earth is a far 
sweet garden of God, eternity its season, its fruits 
the spiritual sons of God — this is the illumination 
of the world-men. 

After this first deep breath of the soul comes 
the gloom and the storm, for the awakened spir- 
itual consciousness perceives that his brother 

[310] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

sleeps. The world-man goes forth to tell his 
story, to be crucified for his story, to die every day 
if need be. For the death of the body is as noth- 
ing, if through martyrdom, others may be brought 
to see. . . . The greater the service, the greater 
the replenishment; the greater the replenishment 
the greater the service again. 

In-breathing and outpouring — that is the eter- 
nal plan. Everything is for the individual; and 
yet the law is so glorious, for it reads : You can- 
not achieve the larger consciousness of the individ- 
ual, except that you live for others. . . . Just a 
little while, the peril of the Crossing. Quickly 
there comes the balance of spiritual power, by 
which the avoidance of evil becomes automatic 
and instinctive. The sense of well-being comes 
alone in service for others, the right hand of the 
soul's life. Through inspiration and service, the 
rhythm of world-manhood is attained, its vision 
and accomplishment. Apart from this rhythm, 
having once touched it, is a sense of moral illness 
that is insupportable. 

Ahead on the road are the world-men. . . . 
The conscious, intensive cultivation of the human 
spirit is just beginning. Obedience to exterior 
voices is the way of falseness and disorder. The 
perfect beginning is the mastery of the self, its 
most obvious errors and perversions. First the 
ma'stery of the body ; then to still the voice of the 

[311] 



MIDSTREAM 



brain, which in the world-man is not his creative 
centre, but the instrument of his creation — the re- 
ceptive surface for his inspiration. Your brain is 
a babbling child; your soul is like a prophet walk- 
ing in the garden. The prophet turns, enters 
your house with inspired face, bringing a mes- 
sage for you — for you alone. The continued 
whimpered nothings of the child distract the 
prophet's intention, and he departs without leav- 
ing the revelation. You must still the voice of 
the brain to hear the deeper, the unerring voice. 

The lower self and all its deforming emotions 
are cleared from a man's work, when he realises 
that he is an instrument of the universal spiritual 
energy; that the eminent honour in life is that he 
has made himself fine enough to be used; that all 
fine work and high behaviour is a spiritual flower- 
ing through the physical man. He sees clearly 
that he contaminates his instrument, and the 
source of its power, when he seeks to identify 
himself in a worldly way with his art or be- 
haviour. 

First the animal man, then the self -man, then 
the world-man, finally the God-man — the perfect 
fruit of earth. These beings differ one from an- 
other in glory through their instrumentation of 
the spiritual consciousness — the varying heights 
of vibration with which they respond to the uni- 
versal driving energy, which we have the temerity 
to call God. . . . 

[312] 



MAN AND HIS MOTHER 

Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in their supreme 
moments of listening, heard a measure or two of 
the heavenly harmonies. That was their receiv- 
ing. Most miserable of mortals would they have 
been, had they not been able to turn their gifts 
to men. They enfolded the harmonies (and this 
was their peculiar and inimitable service) in 
the substance of their technique, and made them 
permanent through the invention of the scale. 
Thus the harmonies were safely lowered to a vi- 
bration, to which the common ear is responsive. 
By listening again and again, we comprehend 
their majesty. 

All creative thought is spiritually energised. 
The mind with its inimitable hosts of experience, 
momentarily vibrates to such a pitch that it 
strikes contact w r ith a spiritual revelation. This 
is the high moment of genius. A single human 
interpretation of one of these spiritual facts has, 
for instance, altered and accelerated the traffic of 
the whole world. The highest moments of hu- 
man genius in the past, are but suggestions of 
that which is to be the steady consciousness of 
the world-men of the future. 

. • . That superb Son of Mary emerged from 
the simplicity of labour to a simplicity that was 
cosmic — and yet two millenniums afterward, we 
are just beginning to realise that He meant what 
He said. The socialists declare that He talked for 
them; in the fresh splendor of His simpleness, the 

[313] 



MIDSTREAM 



mystics (long and long they searched the ar- 
cana) are grasping all the dimensions of life. 
It is like coming home — like the green hills of 
home after a stormy passage — this walking forth 
of Jesus to meet us again — a world-man of sur- 
passing simplicity, our exemplar and delight. 

We hear the song-sparrow a thousand times. 
At last in some moment of our purer receptivity, 
we realise that this is one of Nature's angels say- 
ing: "The plan is good. The plan is good/' 
• . . The sparrow was singing it all the time. 



THE END 



[314] 



Noteworthy Critical Reception Accorded Will 
Levington Comfort's 

DOWN AMONG MEN. 



Outlook: Possessed of a marvellous descrip- 
tive genius, equipped with a remarkably flexible 
use of English, and impelled by the passion of a 
mystic, — the author of Down Among Men has 
written a striking novel. His picture of the 
Russian soldiers is epic in its quality. 

Literary Digest: A book for real men and 
women — unusually powerful and thrilling. The 
book is bound to create discussion. 

William Merton Payne in The Dial: Seems to 
us the most exalted and appealing story Mr. Com- 
fort has thus far written. His picture of the 
struggle in the fields of millet — out of which was 
born Morning's great resolution — has the Tol- 
stoyan handling The scenes are set forth with 
a sense of beauty and power of conviction that 
are expressive of the author's terrible earnestness 
and deep sincerity. 

The Argonaut: A purpose so strong as to 
amount almost to a passion, and so vivid as to give 

[315] 



CONCERNING DOWN AMONG MEN 

his words a sort of rhythm that proceeds as much 
from feeling as from art. A novel of extraordi- 
nary power. It is as good as Routledge Rides 
Alone. It could hardly be better. 

Atlantic Monthly: There is so much real fire 
in it — the fire of youth that has seen and suffered 
— so much vitality and passion that one grows 
chary of petty comments. About the author's 
conception there is never any lack of vividness. 
The writer offers us the cup of life, and there is 
blood in the cup. 

Current Opinion: The Russian ploughman, a 
symbolic figure, steps out of Mr. Comfort's novel 
with arresting vividness. Here is a novelist 
worth watching. 

Norma Bright Carson in The Book News 
Monthly: This is the story of the new man and 
the new woman — the greater Adam and the finer 
Eve. It is the tale of man's gift to men and 
woman's gift to man. It has all the sorrow of the 
world's sorrow, and the compassion of a Christ; 
it has the joy of a morning's sunrise after a night 
of horror and stress. 

Hears fs Magazine: Will Levington Comfort 
is one of the few Americans who do big things in 
fiction like those which now and then come to 

[316] 



CONCERNING DOWN AMONG MEN 

us from across the water. All of his work is writ- 
ten with distinction and with a spiritual dare that 
is contagious. In his poetic vault and vision he 
joins such masters as George Meredith and Mau- 
rice Hewlett. 

Edwin L. Shuman in Chicago Record-Herald: 
An almost perfect tale of courage and adventure. 
In some respects a great novel; in all respects a 
novel above the ordinary, a novel to stir ideals, 
compel thought and provoke discussion. 

Springfield Republican: One of the most in- 
teresting of our American novelists, Mr. Comfort 
is attempting even at the cost of ephemeral popu- 
larity, to strike a deeper note in his fiction and to 
make it pulsate with the larger and more vital 
emotions. He is most warmly to be praised. 

Elia M. Peattie in Chicago Tribune: The 
book challenges attention. Contains some of the 
most remarkable scenes which have appeared in 
recent American fiction. There is clearly evi- 
denced, too, that subtle and peculiar understand- 
ing of women which is comparable to that of Wil- 
liam Sharpe in his Fiona Macleod personality. 

Louise M. Field in New York Times: "It is 
one of the achievements of this twentieth century 
that our writers are beginning to see war, not as 

[317] 



CONCERNING DOWN AMONG MEN 

'the tumult and the shouting/ nor even 'the Cap- 
tains and the Kings,' but as the man in the ranks, 
and of this new visioning Mr. Comfort is one of 
the pioneers. Those who are familiar with this 
author's work will not need to be told how su- 
perbly he describes it all, until the whole culmi- 
nates in the vivid, symbolic figure of that Plough- 
man who came out of the millet to his death. 
Serving men, loving them, and standing alone — 
this is the heart of the book. Yet there is more, 
very much more, in it; few richer novels than 
this of Mr. Comfort's have been published in 
many a long day." 

B. K. in Boston Evening Transcript: "It is a 
duty and a pleasure to record the remarkable fact 
that in this book Mr. Comfort has corrected at a 
single stroke all the defects in the two previous 
books faithfully catalogued by this reviewer when 
they appeared. It is an astonishing feat, but it 
is something more. In meaning much for Mr. 
Comfort, this means much for us all ... a new 
and unshackled Comfort." 

"No better writing since Frank Norris has come 
to us than the first half of this book, dealing with 
the gifted but wayward boy who rides from the 
field of Liaoyang. . . . Where Norris loved to 
picture men in the grip of economic forces, Com- 
fort likes to study them under the spell of a 
woman." 

[318] 



CONCERNING DOWN AMONG MEN 

H. L. Mencken in Smart Set: A novelist I 
admire for his gift of fluent and luscious utterance. 
This Comfort, in fact, can write like the devil. 

Edwin Markham in N. Y. American: Mr. 
Comfort's work is like the on-rush of summer in 
the high Sierras — a season's growth is crammed 
into a month's space. His man and woman are 
of the latest and finest spirits of our own era — the 
glowing nebulae of this surging new time which is 
fusing the past and forging the future. 

Mary Adams Stearns in Chicago Evening Post: 
The picture of the Russian ploughman for simple 
grandeur has never been surpassed. 

Rev. Chas. F. Aked in N. Y. American: Mr. 
Comfort crystallises a world-movement in a sin- 
gle tragic incident. He sings the epic of the 
Ploughman. 

Ida Gilbert Myers in the Washington Star: A 
great story. This is the epic of the woman moth- 
ering the world. 

Peter Fagin in Boston-Herald: A story whose 
parts fit like a palace of the Incas. 

N. P. D. in New York Globe: We can say 
with all sincerity that we know of no recent bit 

[319] 



CONCERNING DOWN AMONG MEN 

of descriptive writing that can match this for sus- 
tained, breathless, dramatic interest. 

Chicago Daily News: The single figure of the 
Russian Ploughman in tragedy, simplicity and 
strength, can only be compared to one of Millet's 
masterpieces. 



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